On Pins and Needles

“I know they’re environmentalists,” he supplied.

“If that’s what you call it. Most folks called it rabble-rousin’ and trouble-makin’ and worse. They turned that farm of theirs into one of them communes for a while before they had kids. There were rumors of free love and drug-takin’ and who knows what all goin’ on.”

“Really?” Josh said, interested to hear what his mother was saying. “What happened after they had kids?”

“No more communal livin’ with the slew of long-haired, smelly sorts they had there before. But even after that they’d let just any passerby into their house. It’s one thing to be neighborly and friendly and hospitable to folks if you know ’em or if you know somebody else who knows ’em. But the Baileys, they’d take in vagabonds and riffraff, anybody.”

“Do you remember anyone like that in particular? Around eighteen years ago?”

Josh’s mother was an enormous woman—six feet tall and three hundred pounds. Her hair was pure white and she wore it pulled into a bun on the top of her head, leaving every inch of her meaty face exposed for the look she gave her son that said he was out of his mind.

“Do I remember who might have been hangin’ around the Bailey place eighteen years ago? ’Course not. It wasn’t like I visited with ’em. They alienated them selves from folks around here.”

“How did they do that?”

“Mostly by not eatin’ meat.”

“A lot of people don’t eat meat,” Josh pointed out, suppressing a smile at his mother’s horror at the very notion.

“Not back when they were around. But even then nobody woulda cared what they ate or didn’t eat except that they made it known that they objected to the raisin’ of animals for food. That didn’t make ’em popular in ranch country. Plus they picketed around town and made more’n one scene at Margie Wilson’s Café and over at the Dairy King. Then there was some vandalizing of the slaughter house that every body knew had to be them even though the sheriff at the time couldn’t prove it.”

Junebug paused a moment, as if some thing had just occurred to her.

Amidst more sneezing, Josh hoped for a breakthrough, some flash of memory about someone or something that had gone on at the Bailey place eighteen years ago.

But that wasn’t what he got. Instead his mother said, “Come to think of it, it doesn’t really fit that they’d be involved in hurtin’ a person when they were so set against any harm comin’ to any livin’ thing. They thought eatin’ an egg was a crime against nature.”

“That’s what their daughter says about them, too.”

“Pretty girls, those Bailey daughters. I saw ’em in town the other day. Which of ’em were you talkin’ to?”

“Megan. The one Scott knows.”

“The acupuncture one?”

“Yeah.”

That’s all he said—yeah. And some thing about it was enough to raise his mother’s bushy white eyebrows.

“What about the other one? Did you do any talkin’ to her?” Junebug asked as if she were testing him.

“I didn’t meet the other one. She didn’t come home the whole time I was at their place overseeing the removal of the evidence.”

“But you liked the acupuncture one well enough.”

It was a statement of fact, not a question, and even though Josh was a grown man his mother still surprised him with how easily she could see through him.

“I didn’t find anything to dislike about her,” he answered, making sure to sound completely noncommittal. “But my job isn’t to like or dislike her. My job is to find out how and why someone was buried in her backyard eighteen years ago, the same month her family moved out of Elk Creek.”

A slow, knowing grin spread across Junebug’s face. “Oh, you liked ’er all right.”

Josh just rolled his eyes and forced the subject back to the matters at hand. “What about anybody around here disappearing suddenly, eighteen years ago? Do you remember anything like that? Maybe someone connected with the slaughter house? Or to some thing else the Baileys were opposed to?”

“Nah.” Junebug confirmed what Millie had told him the night before about the lack of missing persons cases in town. “Besides, if somethin’ like that had ever happened ’round here there’d still be talk and you’d of heard it already yourself.”

That was true enough. Stories in Elk Creek were told over and over through generations.

“But if the Baileys took in passers-by,” Josh reasoned, “there could have been someone there who no one else knew or took notice of. Or would have thought twice about when they weren’t around anymore.”

“S’pose so. Here today, gone tomorrow, there were a lot of folks like that with the Baileys. But then there’s always been ranch hands or crop-pickers who’ve come in and left again without much ado. It’s just that the Baileys were the only ones to open their doors to even the disreputable sorts who happened through.”

Josh nodded, taking a mental note of the picture his mother was painting of the Baileys and realizing that it didn’t make his job any easier.

Then he said, “And there isn’t anything else you can think of that might help?”

Junebug shrugged her beefy shoulders. “Sorry.” Then, as if that were far less important than the interest she thought her son had in Megan Bailey, she said, “Maybe you ought to try that acupuncture for your allergy.”

Josh pre tended that was the farthest thing from his mind.

“Couldn’t hurt,” Junebug persisted.

“Having needles stuck in me? What about that do you think couldn’t hurt?” he scoffed.

“They say it’s painless.”

“Who says?”

“I’ve just heard. Besides, you could stare into that Megan Bailey’s pretty face and I’ll bet you wouldn’t even feel the pain.”

“I have an investigation into an eighteen-year-old crime on my hands. I don’t have time for whatever it is you’re tryin’ to encourage here.”

“Investigatin’ a body in her backyard’ll give you the chance to see ’er. Talk to ’er. Get to know ’er. Havin’ her do acupuncture, that would be another way. You keep to yourself too much ever since Farrah did wrong by you. Time you get out there again.”

Josh finished his coffee and took his cup to the sink. “I think for now I’ll just tend to business, if that’s all right with you.”

Junebug didn’t say another word as Josh suffered through one more sneezing attack.

But once it was over and he headed out of the kitchen to get to work, he caught her smiling that knowing smile again.

Only this time it irritated him to no end.

“How did a Ladies’ League meeting and dinner turn into some thing that kept you out so late I fell asleep waiting for you?” Megan asked her sister Annissa when Annissa got out of bed at eight the next morning and came into the kitchen where Megan was having tea and toast.

“Didn’t you get the message I left on the answering machine?” Nissa countered with a question of her own.

“I got it but all you said was you’d had a good response to the chair massages and didn’t know when you’d get here. What exactly does that mean? The Ladies’ League had you doing chair massages until after midnight?”

Nissa laughed as she made herself a cup of herbal tea. “No, but I was a big hit there. So big that Kansas Heller suggested that if I was interested in drumming up even more business I should take the chair to her husband’s honky-tonk one night and do a few free massages there, too. You know, The Buckin’ Bronco, over by the train station? She said I’d be introducing the massages to a whole different con tin gent and broaden my customer base. I thought she was right and that I should strike while the iron was hot, so when she offered to take me over right then, I accepted.”