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  DARRYL WIMBERLEY

  THE PERMANENT PRESS

  Sag Harbor, NY 11963

  Copyright © 2018 by Darryl Wimberley

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

  For information, address:

  The Permanent Press

  4170 Noyac Road

  Sag Harbor, NY 11963

  www.thepermanentpress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wimberley, Darryl, author.

  Post facto / by Darryl Wimberley.

  First edition.

  Sag Harbor, NY: The Permanent Press, [2018]

  ISBN: 978-1-57962-555-9

  eISBN: 978-1-57962-582-5

  1. Mystery fiction.

  PS3573.I47844 P67 2018

  813'.54—dc23            2018032624

  Printed in the United States of America

  PROLOGUE

  Believe the reports or don’t—fake news or real—makes no difference to me. Whether they were weather balloons or flying saucers or ghosts, I never claimed to see anything, at least not publicly. I’m just the umpire, the reporter actually, though when you’re the solo scrivener for a paper with barely a thousand subscribers it’s not like you’re Rupert Murdoch. The Clarion is the smallest newspaper in northern Florida, and barely hanging on. Along with everything else.

  It’s also the only rag in the region owned by a female.

  You might think a small-town gal made good would make some splash coming home to rescue her burg’s only free press, but that has not been my experience. Aside from the headline I composed myself, there were no announcements to indicate that Howard Buchanan’s daughter had returned home to “take over” the paper. In the two years since, I should not have been surprised to see that the Clarion is not valued much differently than the Western Auto right down the street and probably a lot less than the coffee shop behind the high school.

  Certainly I enjoy no aura of celebrity. Nobody asks for my autograph. Nobody lingers in thrall for stories of the big city. As for the grist of my work—the exposés of graft, the feud with Speaker Ryan—all go unremarked. More than 80 percent of my home county’s vote in the general election tilted for Donald Trump; that constituency is not interested in my elitist opinion—on anything. Nothing like the attention I received in Boston. I was notorious in that Yankee redoubt. Fearless.

  “Better to have somebody mad with me than ignoring me,” I often challenged my editor, and most times he’d agree.

  “But you can never go home again, Clara,” my husband reminds me.

  “It’s not just about me,” I reply lamely.

  “Don’t bullshit yourself, sweetheart—you didn’t buy this sheet to rescue anything or anyone but yourself.”

  Well, there you go. A reality check, courtesy of my husband, Randall. That would be Randall Greene, software wizard and couch potato. One-time lobbyist on K Street.

  Randall puts the “T” in Tough Love.

  “No one cares about Boston, Clara. Quit expecting them to.”

  My husband always calls me “Clara,” as did my Boston colleagues, anyone in the profession really. In fact, until our exile, I doubt my husband ever heard anyone address me as Clara Sue, but in my hometown, that’s my name. Even my maiden name remains fixed and unchanged in the minds of my relatives and neighbors, and why shouldn’t it? I kept the family name, after all, even in my big-city byline. For selfish reasons, of course.

  Clara Buchanan conveys more gravitas, in my opinion, than Clara Greene.

  “You’re not the first journalist to lose her column.” Randall continued to correct the course of our new journey. “Doesn’t make you a goddamned martyr.”

  It took three days in a U-Haul to relocate from Massachusetts to my homestead eighty miles south of Tallahassee, and the thing that struck me most in the course of that resettlement, aside from a casual indifference to my profession, was a pervading aura of decline. President Trump maintains that he is revitalizing manufacturing and creating jobs nationwide, but that’s not what I see in my region. A whole lot of Florida’s Big Bend remains an unbroken swath of pine trees and poverty, despite alternative facts cited to the contrary. There are no factories in my little town. There are no theme parks or pizza joints, either, and for a long time the only medical care available in the entire county was a rotating crew of interns from the medical school in Gainesville. Nothing is close to Laureate, Florida. Nothing is convenient.

  You can drive a hundred miles and never see a golden arch.

  Our biggest employer is a medium security prison just north of town. The ruins of agricultural enterprise are evident in razed barns and rusted tractors all along Highway 27. Flue-cured tobacco was once a major cash crop in Lafayette County. I’ve spent as many hours stringing tobacco in my lifetime as I have editing copy, and everyone I grew up with worked in those barns and fields, but no longer.

  There are very few locals cultivating the Golden Leaf anymore—a good thing in some respects, I suppose—but the decline of that noxious production has paralleled a sharp erosion of healthier enterprises. Take dairies, for instance. There are fewer than half as many dairies working in Lafayette, Taylor, and Dixie Counties as there were ten years ago. There are fewer chicken houses. Fewer truck farms. But there are many, many more acres of pine trees.

  Land that used to make hay or pasture Holsteins has been planted in slash pine destined for cardboard and paper. A topography that used to mix freshwater lakes and sloughs with stands of tidewater cypress and yellow heart pine is largely drained now to feed the need for pulp. Driving to work each morning, I follow a narrow blacktop into a vast maze of pine trees, a featureless grid planted in narrow rows as uniform as a picket fence. Sometimes I’ll spot laborers working the needled alleys between. But you won’t see ICE agents trolling for the undocumented in Lafayette County. Our illegals are too valuable to be deported, families of Latinos toiling with their children in plain sight and, despite nativist howls to the contrary, indispensable.

  I am sometimes disoriented on my daily commute, the sun flashing at intervals between alleys of slash pine like a stroboscope in some giant discotheque. But the families inside are not dancing. They labor—mothers, fathers, even children. Raking straw for twenty-five cents a bale. That’s twenty-five cents per bale.

  Might as well be working for the fucking pharaoh.

  At least they’re working. A few months back, our local Optimist Club sent an open letter to the Clarion chiding local politicos for not getting some of that tourist industry, illustrating yet again the difference between confidence and delusion. There aren’t enough vacationers between here and Steinhatchee to field a football team, let alone revive a region devastated by failed farms, foreclosures, and the related flotsam of voodoo economics.

  This isn’t Panama City. We don’t have kitesurfers or bikinis. We don’t have golf courses or multiplex theaters. Tourists are not coddled or courted in Lafayette or Taylor or Dixie Counties, at least not inland. It’s spotty, even along the coast, though there are signs of incursion. I recently learned that some arriviste from Fort Myers has got a weekend condo replete with Wi-Fi and solar panels rising on stilts off Pepperfish Keys. And Dead Man’s Bay, once off-limits to anyone but fishermen and hunters, is now punctured at more or less regular intervals with beach houses piled over canals that take Jet Skis and powerboats through prairies of turtle grass on their way to the Gulf of Mexico.

  Where, as a girl, I used to wade in cutoffs gigging flounder, I now see out-of-towners in sporting apparel on boogie boards, th
eir runabouts kicking up a salty spray beneath the sentinel of pelicans and osprey. Other visitors take to the open water in expensive kayaks, scooping up scallops from the shallows along with bottles of soda pop, Gatorade, and the occasional condom.

  Used to be, Roy’s was the only restaurant for fifty miles up and down the coast. Then there was Cooey’s. There is a little-known resort at Steinhatchee; Jimmy Carter stayed there some decades ago, and I will acknowledge that on that narrow strip of pine and palmetto you can see the impact of disposable income year-round. But as for the rest—?

  Failed farms and single-wides. Broken trampolines. Listless children.

  Most folks who leave our county, young or old, do not return. Senator Stanton’s wife is an exception. Barbara “Babs” Stanton fluttered back to the Keys and her coastal mansion maybe three years after her husband was blown to bits. The house was an abortion when new, a confusion of gingerbread and Venice Beach, but the verandah is spectacular with a view over maybe fifty or sixty yards of lawn to the pier and water beyond. There is a balcony above that verandah and it was from that vantage that Babs Stanton swears she saw her long-dead husband at the dock smoking his cherished cigar.

  “It was Rooster, no doubt about it!”

  Barbara Stanton drove nearly sixty miles to give me her report face to face.

  “He was on the dock in that ratted-out lawn chair I hate so much. Smoking that cigar.”

  I was the first of many people to whom Babs confided details of her encounter. The stories improved with each telling, which is to be expected. Stanton insisted that I publish the account she gave to me, not needing to mention the certain loss in advertisements and subscriptions if I did not oblige.

  “I tore up my feet running out to see him!” Babs elaborated from the counter looking over my army-salvage desk.

  “You actually saw the senator?” I tried to drain the question of incredulity. “You saw Senator Stanton smoking a cigar?”

  “Big as life,” she insisted.

  “But by the time I got to the dock, he was gone.”

  Most everyone who knows Barbara Stanton will tell you she’s crazy, and that was before her husband’s assassination. “A bubble and a half off plumb,” is a common characterization. I tried to steer our conversation to more empirically founded realms, but Babs wasn’t having it.

  “It was Rooster, Clara Sue. I know it was. Now put it in the paper.”

  The thing is, Stanton recounted her vision just two days before little Jenny O’Steen’s sighting, right before Halloween. Then there was that business at Pickett Lake. And then, just a few weeks later, Hiram Lamb spills his entrails into a slough of stagnant water.

  Normally I’d be posting stories about homecoming and ten-point bucks with copy from candidates running for sheriff or tax assessor, the squalls of politicians competing for attention with photos of local sirens on their senior float, or tackles and tailbacks in their red and white pads. The Future Farmers of America posing purple and gold in their corduroy jackets. There might be an occasional column addressed to larger concerns.

  Immigrants. Islam. The withering middle class.

  The latest tweet.

  Not this year. Call it fake news or infotainment I couldn’t keep up with the reports. Folks started calling in from all over. But never north of Perry, never south of Cross City, and rarely east of the Suwannee River. I received a report or two from Live Oak, but the vast majority of sightings in whatever variety were alleged to have occurred in Lafayette or Taylor Counties, many of these only a couple of miles from my own modest lanai.

  There was no comparable activity anyplace else in the country. California is supposed to be the land of fruits, nuts, and abductees, but those folks were too busy looking for water to worry about UFOs or visits from the beyond. I began to long for the days when rainfall was grist for my own newspaper. What psychosis precipitated these other sightings? These visitations? Maybe it was no more than the fallout of Halloween, unemployment, and coffee shop caffeine.

  Maybe.

  Whatever the source, the reports multiplied. Sometimes a dozen sightings in a single night, everything from dead relatives to the always-reliable flying saucer. I still don’t know exactly what to do with all the material. My little rag doesn’t have enough columns to detail every incident, feigned or otherwise. I thought about making a numerical summary and leaving it at that. Or I could go through every message, note, and e-mail, and serialize the whole thing, like Dickens. Except I’d be getting a fuckload less than a penny a page.

  Talk about a career change. Here I was an award-winning journalist organizing what amounted to a scrapbook for Area 51. These were not the topics I’d hoped to headline on my hometown paper. When I worked for the Globe, I challenged the Speaker of the House of Representatives with questions about tax policy and entitlements and foreign entanglements. People from K Street to Kansas read my columns. The closest I get to real reporting, now, is the still-unsettled investigation of Hiram Lamb’s death. Sheriff Buchanan is awful closemouthed about Lamb’s accident, but then Colt hasn’t been the same since he witnessed that gruesome display at the lake. He won’t admit to it, of course.

  “Just a meth-head’s hoax.” Our sheriff shrugs it off.

  And who knows? Maybe Colt’s right.

  But that’s not the point of the story I’m writing, not the whole point anyway. The angle I’m taking is broader than any single incident. I’d like to know why people believe anything. Why do some folks trust a fourth grader’s fantastic account, but not a senator’s wife? A known drunkard claiming alien abduction is taken seriously, but not the testimony of an entire family bearing witness to a miracle in the pines. Why?

  For that matter, why do some folks accept evidence related to a warming climate while others dismiss that information out of hand? Why is Darwin still a dirty word in many circles? How often do you hear that cutting taxes creates jobs and raising taxes kills them? Do these claims reflect facts-on-the ground or are they only a mirror of what somebody wants to believe? It seems to me that folks who swear they’ve seen alien spacecraft aren’t different in principle than supply-side enthusiasts, because in either case facts don’t matter.

  Fuck facts. Belief is what matters.

  So who are the true believers? Who are the dissemblers? What makes us trust one person or policy over another? Because no matter how the apple gets sliced, you either believe what people tell you—

  Or you don’t.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Second Grader Spots Little Green Man

  The Clarion

  The first sighting did not occur, as you might expect, in the black night of some hybrid forest, or in a hayfield scythed to a pattern of alien encryption, but in broad daylight at Butch McCray’s candy store. Butch is close to seventy years old and has sold sweets and sodas across the street from our county’s only school for as long as anybody can remember.

  You’d lose any claim to verisimilitude if you described Butch’s place of business as quaint or cute. Truth is, it’s a shack, a tiny box of lathed cedar sealed with tar paper. But it’s a busy shack. Noontime at Butch’s store looks like something a child might crayon onto a piece of scrap paper, the wobbled square of his candy shack splashed yellow and blue, kids emerging by the dozens in stick figures of black or brown, their fingers spread wide like pitchforks to gig bottles of soda or Popsicles rendered in shades of magenta or lime.

  I can remember getting an orange Nehi and a PayDay for twenty-five cents, pressing dimes, nickels, or pennies into Butch’s gnarled hand, and if you brought him ten wrappers you got a penny off any purchase. Butch has a thing about candy wrappers. There are boxes of wraps stuffed and stacked behind the counter—Mars bars, Hershey chocolate, Snickers—you name it, each foil pressed flat as a daisy in a dictionary. Butch is odd, no doubt about it, a wrinkled gnome with a hump of shoulder and rheumy eyes that remain, even in direct address, fixed on some distant point beyond the long bill of his bib cap. Locals write him off as sim
ple or retarded. The idiot son of parents taken too soon and violently.

  It was getting toward Halloween after a summer that seemed never to end when Jenny O’Steen skipped lunch on her way to Butch’s store, a second grader in a ruffle-tier skirt bound for a Nehi and Honey Bun. Jenny was diabetic but even so should have been fine. She was allowed a single treat during the day and in any case had received her morning shot of insulin. On the other hand, it was unseasonably warm and by the time Miss Jenny got to Butch’s store there was already a line of kids stretching along the sidewalk that girdled the store, all of them sweltering on a shadeless street beneath a lingering dog-day sun.

  Laureate Consolidated School sprawls across the asphalt from Butch’s place, a complex consisting of a gym, cafeteria, maintenance sheds, and two buildings linked with breezeways sufficient to bridge the Hellespont. Secondary grades matriculate in a monolith of cement and jalousie windows built by the WPA in 1931; grade schoolers are located in a more recently completed facility featuring metal roofing, central air, and reliable plumbing, all amenities provided courtesy of those cursed federal funds.

  Come lunchtime it’s common to see grade schoolers and older students jostling for a place in the queue at Butch’s store. By the time I was a high school senior, that line might have run to a dozen kids, but nowadays you can see scores of young people milling around, scrapping for position and singing out orders for Pepsis and Snickers in the quest for a fix of sugar.

  The complexion of that daily gaggle has also changed over the years. My father once recalled the first African American he ever saw at Butch’s canteen. “Harold Sykes was his name,” my father declared. “Boy loved his sodas and moon pies. Played football too. First Negro ever to put on a helmet and pads at Laureate high.”

  Turns out Harold Sykes was also the first black student to graduate from Laureate high school.

  A few months later he was killed in some rice paddy in southeast Asia.

  Of course, by now the school is thoroughly integrated, de facto if not in spiritu. You take a drive past the LCS now and you’ll see black kids and Latinos, maybe even an Asian or two, mixing with the scions of white gentry at Butch’s candy bank, the Lambs and Buchanans and O’Steens, who have for generations run the county like a fiefdom mixing with poorer blood.