“You don’t know our lives,” Leonard said. “We could actually be smart.”
Stump made a grunting sound. “I got a pretty good idea about your lives, and I’m thinking it isn’t pretty.”
“So you been over every inch?” I said.
“I might have missed a centimeter under the shitter, but yeah,” Stump said. “You see, it’s my job.”
I ran my gloved hand over the top of the backend section, the place where the tank would be contained. “What if it isn’t a tank in here?”
“What else would it be?” Stump said.
“Always ask questions,” I said, “that is the path to wisdom.”
“Fucking Confucius?” Stump said
“Hap Collins,” I said.
“Look, I was about to take the bolts out of that thing. I was even going to lift off the top and look inside. Thought that up all by myself before you got here.”
“Now,” Leonard said, “don’t start selling yourself for more than you are.”
Stump grunted again and left the bookmobile.
“He seems to like you guys,” Hanson said.
A moment later, the man and the woman we had seen wandering the garage entered with battery powered tools, pushed past us, went to the back, removed the bolts, and lifted the top off the covering. They carried it away with them without even looking inside. Curiosity would not kill those cool cats.
When they left the bus with the metal top, Stump reappeared and waddled down the aisle toward the now open container. He had a flashlight in his hand. He turned it on and looked inside, turned his head from left to right, said, “Huh.”
We went over and looked. Stacked from left to right, six in a row, were oil-covered, time-withered little bodies, and one larger one.
“How about that?” Stump said.
“We told you that you ought to look,” Leonard said.
“And I told you I was about to,” Stump said.
“You say that now,” Leonard said.
“I hate both you bastards,” Stump said.
“You now belong to a sizable club,” Hanson said.
four
You can bet that threw a wrench into things. Where before there was the problem of the long missing bookmobile and its return due to a twelve-year-old boy driving it for reasons unknown, not to mention his death by accident, now we had six oil-covered bodies to identify, tucked up in the back of the bookmobile.
Who put those bodies there? Where had the bookmobile been for all those years, and why did it look brand new? And while we’re making a list, where was Hoodoo Harry? Was hers the larger oil-soaked body?
Well, I’d like to tell you it all came together, mysteries solved, but it didn’t. In fact, a few weeks passed by. They examined the corpses and sent off DNA samples from the bodies, five off which turned out to be kids, but that was all they knew. No DNA matches. The sixth one was a female adult, but if it was Hoodoo Harry, no one had yet tracked down a relative to make the determination. But the search was in progress.
Complication on complication multiplied by more complications.
Me and Leonard felt pretty smart for a few weeks about the bookmobile container, but truth was, we weren’t expecting bodies at all. And further truth was, Stump and his forensic crew were minutes from discovering what was there. So had we not shown up, they’d have found the bodies anyway.
As the weeks went by, I began to feel agitated, and had trouble sleeping at night. One night, lying in bed with Brett, I was tossing and turning, and she flipped on the night stand light, rolled over and lifted herself on one elbow and looked at me.
“What the hell, Hap? You been acting like a jumping bean for a week. Moan and groan all night.”
“I moan and groan?” I said, sitting up in bed, looking at the beautiful Brett, her flame-red hair tied back in a pony tail.
“Yep.”
“I’m bothering you?”
“Only when I’m trying to sleep. Or lie still. And you go to the toilet all night. What’s up with that?”
“Poo-poo.”
“Six, seven times a night?”
“Well, I go in there and read.”
“Why can’t you sleep?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s the kid, isn’t it?”
“Guess it is. Think about him a lot. I close my eyes, I see his eyes, looking out of the windshield of that bookmobile.”
Brett fluffed her pillow and folded it against the headboard and put her back against it.
“You been looking into it?” she asked.
“No. Hanson said it was his case to investigate.”
“That’s never stopped you and Leonard before.”
“It hasn’t, but, I guess we didn’t know where to go with this.”
Brett pursed her lips, said, “You know what? Just look up the old route of the bookmobile, and follow it.”
“Marvin’s done that.”
“But he isn’t you, Hap.”
“No. He isn’t. He’s smarter and a good investigator.”
“Yeah, well, you do have that going against you. But is he more dogged than you and Leonard?”
“Hanson used the same word. But I think he’s the one that’s dogged.”
“More dogged than you and your bro?”
“I’m not sure how you measure things on a dogged scale. I’m not sure I know what a dogged scale is. I’m not sure there is one.”
“I’ll tell you right now, you are more dogged. You and Leonard need to get back on the trail and figure things out so I can get a good night’s sleep. And here’s another idea. How about you look up Cason Statler’s friend, the one who runs the newspaper morgue in Camp Rapture. Have him check into things for you. He can find more in a day than the law can find in a month. That guy, isn’t his name Mars, something like that?”
“Mercury.”
“He has the mind for looking into conspiracies, or whatever is going on here. No one knows odd information and can evaluate it better than that guy. Or so you’ve told me. Get him to do some kind of… I don’t know, chart about the route of the bookmobile, then look into missing persons in that area, on the route. Might be something in that.”
“You’re smart,” I said.
“I know that,” she said.
“Since you’re awake, want to fool around?”
“No. And if you ever expect to again, you better quit tossing, moaning and groaning and talking to yourself.”
“I talk to myself, too?”
“Yep.”
Brett turned out the light. “Now, close your little Hap eyes and shut your little Hap mouth, and go the fuck to sleep.”
five
Cason Staler is a Pulitzer Prize winning writer that works at the Camp Rapture newspaper. We’ve known him for awhile. Handsome and quirky, quick of wit, he can also hold his own in a fist fight. He’s a guy with a bunch of odd friends. Including us. He’s a big dog over at the paper. His friend, Mercury, works downstairs in the news morgue, sometimes known as the first level of Hell. Mercury is a kind of a genius. Cason told him about us, explained our problem, and left us to it.
Down there they have all the back issues of the paper, as well as all manner of stuff, stacked up this way and that. You have to wind your way through it all to find Mercury. Down there he was king. Of course, he was the only one that worked down there, so the job position was easily filled.
Mercury was blond and pale, but looked strong. His job was to put all the old newspapers on the computer, then send the originals off to somewhere where they were collected by someone for some reason unknown. In his spare time, Mercury conducted investigations of his own. Some of them were nutty. Crop circles. Flying saucers. The Kennedy assassination, involving everyone but Bigfo
ot, though in time he might work him in as well. But he was smart and helpful, if you could point his nose in the right direction. He loved a good mystery, and he had a way of calculating odd situations into a recognizable patterns.
After we wound our way through the stacks and came up on Mercury, he said, “Welcome to the center of the earth.”
The overhead light was thin back there, but there was a bright lamp on his desk, and there was another on a table that was pushed up against it. Both lamps had metal shades over the bulbs, but those had been tilted so as to let more of the light leak out.
On the table were books, assorted newspapers, clippings, an old microfilm machine, and on a chair was a small TV and an old fashioned VCR. The VCR cord was fastened to the back of the TV and plugged into a plastic power strip on the floor. The wire from his computer was plugged to the bar as well.
“How are you men?” he said.
“We’re fine,” Leonard said. “Cason says you can help us.”
“That depends. He told me what you’re looking for, and I’ve pulled out a few things, got some stuff on the computer I can show you.”
Mercury inched over to it, seated himself in front of it, touched a button. The computer lit up like a Christmas display. “There’s not a lot here, but what’s here is of interest. Here is the path of the bookmobile.”
We took a gander at the place he was pointing, a map with a moving arrow.
“You can see that it covered quite a bit of ground, but most if it, the places where Harriet stopped, were right near Nesbit. Made a few stops in areas where there were neighborhoods, if you can call a half-dozen houses neighborhoods. Folks wanted books, they either had to be in town at the post office at the right time, or they had to be at one of these stop areas. Six altogether. Last two stops were well out in the country. Wasn’t like it was a money-making business, driving the bookmobile. Harry came once a week, three times a month, then there was a week off. When she wasn’t making this run through Nesbit and the surrounding area, she was on other routes. She drove four days a week, three weeks a month.”
Mercury showed us a few more routes around LaBorde, a spot or two out in the country that were destinations.
“Those are routes on days when she worked outside of the Nesbit area. Way I’d think about it is Harry was from Nesbit, so that would be the hub of everything for her. Also, there have been missing persons cases around Nesbit in the last few years, couple of kids, and Harriet Hoodalay.”
“Quite a coincidence,” Leonard said.
Mercury considered for a moment.
“Place small as Nesbit, you want to connect anyone to the missing kids, you could make the case for everyone there, the community being so small, being so few people. And the missing kids came from the area. Also possible none of what happened in and around Nesbit is related, but that’s where you can make the case that there might be too much coincidence. The law of averages come into play. Someone in, or around Nesbit, is most likely responsible for the kids, but are they responsible for Harriet and the bookmobile? Still likely.”
“Harry and the bookmobile could have come up missing on one of the other routes,” I said.
“Merely saying the most likely scenario is it happened near her home, near Nesbit, and probably someone who knew her, and the two missing kids are related to it all, because that’s who a bookmobile is specifically designed for. Anyone can check out a book, but it’s bored kids, kids that don’t have library access, that they are trying to appeal to. Thing is, now even poor kids have computers and the internet, and with all the lights and bells and whistles, books get lost to a time when we had more patience and less to distract us.”
“We found more than two kids in the bookmobile,” Leonard said.
“Can’t help you there, but if you nose around a bit, you might find more missing than have been reported. I’m going to strongly guess they are all from the same area, and what you’re dealing with is a child predator, someone who likes to stick close to the place he knows. Way it usually works in these cases. And one reason you may not know about the other kids, is they may not have been reported. Neglect is just the thing that puts them in a bad spot, causes them to fall between the cracks. Not the only thing, but a major factor.”
“Think it could have been Harry?” Leonard asked.
“Could be, but then we got to ask, where has she been all this time? After she disappeared there were no more child abduction cases reported, so that leans toward her possibly being responsible, but she doesn’t fit the profile, and nothing was known about the bookmobile until it nearly ran you over. The kid inside, that leans toward him being a victim as well, or a potential victim. An escapee. But I go back to what I said before. Just because we have a report of two children doesn’t mean that’s all there is. You found six bodies, and one not a child, that could be folks who haven’t been reported, and the adult could just be Harry.”
Mercury paused, tapped the keys. A new image came up. It was of a middle-aged black woman.
“Harriet Hoodalay,” he said. “What I found from looking through older microfilm. You know about her supposedly taking a bus trip to see her sister, I assume. Her not arriving?”
“Do you know who first reported her missing?”
“Gardner Moost.”
“General store guy?” Leonard said.
“Correct,” Mercury said. “Said he got that information from her husband, Tom Hoodalay. Tom didn’t report her missing when her vacation ended and she didn’t come back. Gardner asked why she hadn’t come home and Tom told Moost he figured Harriet had run off from him.”
“What’s Harriet’s sister say?”
“She never arrived, but she did buy a bus ticket. No one was doing a head count when it came time to get on the bus, and the bus line closed down its hub here years ago. Whoever worked there back then has scattered to the wind.”
“Maybe Harriet found out something about her husband,” I said. “Like how Tom was using her connection to children to do something he wasn’t supposed to. She decided to get away from him, go see her sister. He was afraid she’d spill the beans to the law, so he killed her.”
“Possible, but unknown,” Mercury said. “But Nesbit, that’s where you begin.”
six
We drove over to Nesbit in my car.
It was a nice drive and a nice day. Not too warm for the time of year. We cruised along the highway for several miles, and into an area where the trees grew thick and the houses were far apart.
Nesbit was off the highway, down a roughly paved road. As we came into the community we saw the post office on one side, general store on the other. Tire and mechanic shop, and so on, were all nearby. We were through the place before we knew it, and I had to turn around and drive us back. First place we stopped was the general store.
It was like stepping back in time. The place was chock-full of cool items, things that I forgot existed, like mule plowing equipment. Not a lot of it, but even some was surprising. There were long shelves of canned goods, prepared by locals, sold on consignment, and there were the sort of things you expected. High shelves with bolts of cloth. Tools. There was a series of bins in the middle of the store, stuffed with fresh vegetables, and according to a sign, locally raised.
There was a counter with a lot of old candies and soft drinks I had forgotten about. There was a break in the piles of goods on that counter, and there was an old fashioned cash register with a black man behind it, sitting on a stool. He was a big fellow, and though he was sitting, I could tell he would tower over both me and Leonard. He had shoulders as wide as a bank vault. He had a red tone to his skin, what in the old days they used to refer to as a red bone Negro, when they were being polite. He had reddish freckles scattered on his cheeks. His hands, which were clutched around a hunting magazine, were about the size of catcher’s mitts. He looked to b
e in his sixties, had a fringe of white hair around his head, just over his ears and nowhere else.
At the counter we greeted him. He put down his magazine and eyed us carefully.
“I help you fellas?” he said.
“Maybe,” I said. “We work for a private detective agency out of LaBorde. We’re trying to find out about James Clifton. I‘m Hap Collins, and this is my associate, Leonard Pine.”
“Gardner Moost,” he said. “Yeah. Sad story. But what can be done for him now?”
“What we’re trying to figure out,” Leonard said, “is how he came by a bookmobile that had been missing for years, and what was he doing driving it?”
“Don’t know what I can tell you. Poor boy was hard luck. Lost most of his family. Good kid, though. Had him a little part time job at the tire shop. You know, picking up things a couple hours after school. Old tires, this and that. He was sleeping at different homes. He slept in the back here a few times. I was thinking of letting him stay full time. Maybe give him a little work on the weekends. Tire shop didn’t use him all week. As for the rest, I don’t know. I don’t think I saw him around the week he ended up gone. I doubt he was going to school. Was supposed to be, but I’d see him walking down the road, not really seeming to be going anywhere. An hour later, you’d see him walk back. I guess I saw him last on a Monday. Then the rest of the week he wasn’t about. Didn’t think much of it. Reason I know he was missing is because he finished up at the tire shop, he’d come over, buy him a pop and a candy bar. Every day. Next thing I know he’s dead, and I hear he was in that old bookmobile. Beyond that, I don’t know a thing about him or the missing bookmobile.”
“Did you know Harriet Hoodalay?” I said.
That gave Moost pause.
“Yes. I did know Harry. Lovely woman.”
“Do you know her husband?” I said. I knew he did, from what Mercury had told us, but I wanted to see where he’d go with it.
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“We ask,” said Leonard, “because Harriet used to drive the bookmobile, then she disappeared. Supposed to be going up North to see her sister but never made it.”