* * *
Jennifer walked back to her cruiser to write Sheriff Ben up again and it just seemed a waste of time. It continued to trouble her that she had to write tickets for Sheriff Ben that he would dutifully pay the next day. Dutiful. That was Sheriff Ben.
For as long as she could remember, there had always been a Sheriff Ben in Stansbury. He wasn’t the kind of cop who made you feel better when he wasn’t around. Even when she had done something wrong, it did not seem so bad if he caught her. It seemed right…somehow fair. When she was thirteen, she declared to her one and only friend, Francis Townsend, that she would take a picture of Mr. Osno. No one had ever seen Mr. Osno, at least no one that would tell. Mr. Osno owned and operated the only pharmacy in Stansbury and no one had ever seen him, at least no one that would tell. Jennifer and Francis would go into Osno’s Pharmacy to watch people interact with the mysterious proprietor. They would sit at the counter and pretend like they were back in the fifties and eat their ice cream and watch as, one after the next, people would bring their slips of paper from their doctors that said what they needed to help fix what ailed them. They would hand those slips off to whomever it was that worked behind the counter.
At the time, Mr. Osno’s counter girl was Gertie Louise Lawrence who was a senior who planned on going to Vassar when she graduated. Gertie could do nothing at all but talk about going to Vassar when she graduated and so it surprised no one at all that Gertie did, indeed, go to Vassar when she graduated. The problem for Gertie was that once she got to Vassar, she lost all focus and direction. She really didn’t know what she wanted to do once she got there. Her whole identity had been built around the wonderful time she would have studying art history and English literature and being a Vassar girl. The problem was that as much as she enjoyed talking about these things, she hated actually doing them. She found art history to be dull and she never really did like reading. For a time, she got by pretending that being a Vassar girl would change her in some deep and profound way and she would come to enjoy the things she always imagined she would enjoy. She would bore her roommate, endlessly going on about how much she loved being at Vassar, but beyond this surface veneer, her emptiness grew. Instead of going to class, she would only talk about how much fun she was going to have in class that day, as if imagining the outcome of the day would somehow make that day’s events happen. If she imagined she was a perfect Vassar girl, then eventually she would become a perfect Vassar girl. But nobody at Vassar liked her because they were all perfect Vassar girls and they knew she was a faker. They started leaving notes under her pillow that advised her to leave, that she wasn’t fit to be a Vassar girl. She ignored them at first. She had an uncanny ability to ignore reality in favor of her imagination. One of her professors told her she would make a fine author, but she hated actually writing. She imagined she would be a fine writer and all the other Vassar girls would love her and admire her for her stories and poems, but she hated actually writing and so she never gave them a chance to love her, which they decidedly did not. One of her professors told her that perhaps she and Vassar were not a good match. By this time, it was getting harder and harder for her to live in her fantasy. The reality that she was not, nor would she ever be, a perfect Vassar girl would persistently shatter her dream and try as she would to put the pieces back together again, there were always gaps where reality would seep through and the more she focused on plugging the gaps, the less she was able to maintain the fantasy world. Every so often, she would look out across the beautiful campus and watch all of the real Vassar girls and she would try to imagine she was one of them just the way she did when she was behind the counter at Mr. Osno’s drug store. But it didn’t work. She wasn’t one of them. She would never be one of them. One day, quietly, she packed her bag and left the campus without a word. She didn’t speak a word to the passengers who sat next to her on the bus back to Stansbury. She didn’t speak a word to her parents when she came home. As she passed old friends on the way into town, she kept her eyes down. They thought that now she was a Vassar girl she was too good for them to spare a friendly word. That wasn’t the case for Gertie. She only had but two words left and they were for her former employer. She calmly walked into the drug store and went to the slot where people left their prescriptions. She took a small note pad from her handbag and wrote her two words on it. She tore the paper off and slipped it into the slot and waited. A moment later, a small bottle of pills dropped through the exit slot. Without a word, Gertie took the bottle of pills home and took the bottle of pills with a glass of water and it did not take long for her to quietly fade away. Jennifer remembered being sixteen and watching from behind a tree across the street from Gertie’s house as Sheriff Ben escorted the corpse to the coroner’s station wagon.
For three years, Jennifer and Francis tried to catch a glimpse of Mr. Osno and all they ever saw were prescriptions going in and drugs coming out and never a sign that a human being existed behind the wall except for the day that Gertie came in and wrote her two words. For three years, Jennifer and Francis tried every trick in their very small book of tricks to discover the truth about the pharmacist. And they did discover some truths. Osno’s Drug Store opened its doors at the beginning of the twentieth century. At the time, Stansbury never had a business that lasted more than a few years. As a matter of fact, Stansbury still never had a business that lasted more than a few years. Things would happen. While Jennifer was investigating Osno, she began to keep a notebook detailing every business that had failed since the pharmacy opened its doors. There had been 142 in all. Everything from dentists to dry goods. It wasn’t because the people of Stansbury did not want to have these services. On the contrary, the locals were desperate for a successful business other than Osno’s Drug Store. Stan Morrison, who made it through the Korean War mostly intact (“Only lost but the one leg,” he would chuckle), kept trying to open a sporting goods store. Stan was responsible for 15 of the failed businesses. Stan loved Stansbury and the people of Stansbury and felt that it needed a sporting goods store because he loved sports and he loved sporting equipment and he wanted to share his loves with his loves. The first store he opened was called “Stan’s Stansbury Sports.” He opened it just after he returned from the war without his left leg. It seems he was teaching a young Korean boy the art of lacrosse with a stick he crafted himself when a grenade fell towards him with bad intent. Now Stan was an excellent lacrosse player and had no trouble fielding the explosive device in his net and flinging it back in the direction it came from. As he turned back to continue his lesson, the boy shot him in the leg - apparently the boy had no taste for lacrosse - and ran off. Normally, a bullet to the leg wouldn’t have resulted in an amputation, but Stan believed in the power of prayer above all things and, after having been struck in the leg by a small caliber bullet, Stan prayed for guidance. For some time. Because the bullet was so small, the wound clotted and stopped bleeding while he prayed. Although it still pained him greatly, Stan believed that his prayer had been answered and that there was no reason to be concerned about the wound any further. Every day, the leg continued to feel worse and worse, but Stan was fully convinced that his prayer had been answered and that everything would be fine. Others around him, however, found that his horrible limp and the increasing stench from his untreated leg were cause for concern and, against his protestations that things would be fine, took him to the surgeon who wasted no time in removing the leg which at that point had become gangrenous. Stan took it all in stride - although he could no longer actually stride, believing that it was his fault in that he prayed for the bullet wound in his leg to be cured, but did not specifically ask to keep the leg. The lack of a leg did not get in the way of Stan’s love of sports and sporting goods, although he was no longer able to participate in his passion, ice hockey. When he opened Stan’s Stansbury Sports, he threw a big party for the whole town and the whole town came. Sadly for Stan and the whole town, a bottle rocket went off course and landed on the roof of the st
ore. No one paid much attention to it as the rest of the fireworks continued to light the night sky for the next hour. It wasn’t until the after-haze of the fireworks powder cloud began to dissipate that Billy Kennisaw noticed the smoke coming from Stan’s Stansbury Sports. Unfortunately for Stan, Billy didn’t care much for sports or Stan as much as he did for Linda Parker, unwed mother of John Parker. Stan, never one to let failure get in his way, rebuilt his store and reopened it, this time as Stansbury Stan’s Sports. Over time, as more fires, floods, freezes and even the Forest Service in an unfortunate act of land reclamation that took The Sports Store of Stansbury along with Stan’s home, never stopped the optimistic owner from trying to enrich the lives of the people of Stansbury with sports. Sadly, both Stan and Super Stan’s Sports, his fifteenth and final attempt to bring joy to the town, met with disaster when a large truck delivering a shipment of baseballs and baseball bats went out of control and slammed into the storefront.
Jennifer discovered some other truths about Osno’s Drugs. They mostly revolved around the fact that no one in the many years that the store had been open ever met, saw or spoke with the proprietor of the store. Orders were all placed by the girl who had been hired to work at the counter. The girl who had been hired to work at the counter had been hired by the girl who previously worked at the counter. No one remembers who hired the first girl who worked at the counter, Jane Carver, who disappeared shortly after she left Osno’s employ to become a modernist. All supply orders were placed by the girl who worked at the counter. All supplies were delivered to the girl who worked at the counter. She would take all the pharmaceutical supplies and place them one by one into the slot. At the end of every shift, she would take all of the day’s earnings and place them into the slot and then her pay would be returned to her via the same slot. There was always only one girl who worked at the counter and when she could not work, the store would be closed. These were the truths Jennifer discovered about Osno’s Drug Store.
Jennifer and Francis were determined to discover the ultimate truth about Mr. Osno. They became convinced that he was either a vampire or the evil Lord Stansbury. One way or another, all of the problems of the town, all of the bad luck, must be related in some way to the continuing presence of that unseen and unknown proprietor. Jennifer became convinced that the only way they could save the town was to expose Osno to the light of day. Francis became convinced that Jennifer was going to get them killed or worse when Jennifer told Francis of her plan. Jennifer tried to convince Francis to go along with her. All she did was convince Francis to go to Sheriff Ben and tell him everything. Jennifer was convinced it was when she told Francis that they were going to blow a hole in the back wall of the drug store with some dynamite that she was going to steal from the Matthews who used it to blow stumps when they cut down trees. Sheriff Ben listened patiently to Jennifer as she explained her evidence against the enigmatic pharmacist. She showed him her notebooks. She displayed her absolute certainty in the facts as she knew them.
“Facts cannot be refuted, Sheriff Ben.”
“Indeed, Jenny. They cannot. You do seem to have accumulated a lot of them.”
“So you have to arrest him.”
“On what charge?”
“Umm…”
She looked at him and saw that he would gladly blow down walls for her if she gave him a reason to. But she had no reason. There was no crime. There was just evil and she knew that even though she had facts that indicated that Osno was evil and she had facts that he was part of what was wrong with Stansbury, there was no crime. She looked at Sheriff Ben and saw that he understood her frustration and for the only time in her life she knew, if just for a moment, what it was like to have a father and she loved him for that.
“Jenny. Keep finding your facts.”
“I will. I promise.”
Jennifer amassed a library of facts, but never uncovered a crime. But she would and then, even though Sheriff Ben was no longer sheriff, he would do his duty and bust down that damned wall with her and destroy the evil bastard. Of course, that didn’t stop her from doing her duty. She wrote Ben Hamilton yet another ticket for speeding.
“Just be more careful, would you, Ben?”
Ben almost smiled. “I’m real close, Jenny. Are you?”
She almost smiled back. “Still just the facts, Ben.” She walked slowly back to her patrol car. She wished that Sheriff Ben could solve his crime and be Sheriff Ben again.