New Title 1 by Ed Gorman Read Free Book Online

surrounding the town itself, belonged to the married couples in their thirties and forties who drove their BMWs and Audis and vans to Cedar Rapids, where they worked, rubbed shoulders with as much modern culture as you could find there, and then escaped every night to live out their fantasies of Andy and Opie and Barney and Aunt Bea.
    There were inevitable clashes, the nastiest, I'm told, coming when two members of the school board pronounced themselves "born again" and proceeded to list twenty-six novels, including The Great Gatsby and Catch-22 , that had to be stricken from the high-school curriculum. If nothing else, this move got all the young professionals interested in the governance of the small community where they lived. They announced that two years from now at this time, they would be fielding their own school-board candidates, and they sure as hell wouldn't be people who found Mark Twain "sinful."
    Welcome to New Hope, located in the northeast corner of the state, pop. 14,683.

    There was a motel right downtown, a good base to work from, pretty much equidistant between the old New Hope and the new housing developments in the hills surrounding it.
    The drive had been four hours, so I needed food and coffee. I decided to try the downtown to get a human sense of the place. The downtown of any place, no matter its size, is where you can get your quickest sketch of a town's sociology.
    I had two eggs, basted, two pieces of wheat toast with raspberry jam, one glass of orange juice, and three cups of coffee.
    I ate these at the counter of a tiny place called Dickie's Diner where, nearing noon, most of the customers were male, roughly half of them dressed in the kind of suits and sports coats you get at Sears, the other half dressed in uniforms of denim, khaki, cotton, all bearing the caps and sew-on badges of gas companies and electric companies and bug-spraying companies. Mixed in with these folks were farmers, all weather-lined faces and big knuckly hands wrapped around chipped white coffee mugs. Not a single young professional in sight.
    The talk, as I picked it up in snatches, was about a new state sales tax the legislature was proposing and what a bunch of worthless idiots that legislature happened to be, and how bad most of the National League teams looked this year, and—this from the businessmen—how the young professionals thought they were too good to shop in downtown New Hope. "They do it all in Cedar Rapids. Not one goddamned bit of support for us!"
    Near the end, just as the third cup of coffee was starting to put a little twitch into my fingers, I heard a name that sounded familiar.
    "Eve McNally find that husband of hers yet?"
    A snort of laughter. "Not unless she knows how to crawl through sewers."
    "How a man can do that to a woman like Eve sure beats me."
    "I really thought the last time he went down to Iowa City to dry out, he'd be all right."
    "Lasted two months. Two damn months is all. Then he was back to the bottle."
    These were two of the suits sitting at the counter. McNally was one of the men mentioned in Mike Peary's letter as a possible suspect. They had me curious. He appeared to be missing, presumably on a drunk. From Mike's profile, a man who drank a lot—maybe to suppress the memories of what he'd done—would fit perfectly.
    I paid my bill and went outside and stood on the corner for a few minutes, enjoying the spring air.
    There was a phone booth across the street. I walked over and looked up the name McNALLY, RICHARD.
    I got the address and drove out there. The town was laid out on an extensive grid broken only by the public square downtown. Railroad tracks cut north-south.
    The houses were eclectic, everything from small Queen Annes to what they used to call "Corn Belt" homes, square white clapboards of two stories with the inevitable squeaking swing on the inevitable front porch. The pastel prefabs that came in after WWII looked a lot older than the houses built eighty, one hundred