Chapter 1

Being old. The reminders were everywhere. Just existing. Waking up, rousing before the dawn, the dimness if the bedroom a second stage or third of a shallow sleep, lying in a pool of semi-consciousness that doesn’t cover your ears so you hear every car and truck rolling down the road or the dog licking whatever part that feels good and abates the boredom humans mistake as contentedness. Then there is the pain.

Ben Tiley Pushed himself up, grunting, he got his left elbow under him, then his right hand to push himself into a sitting position on the side of the bed, legs dangling inches over the rough, wide boards of the floor, nail heads visible beneath the thick syrup of varnish and wax, slick and brilliant. There was nothing about his life that was slick and brilliant other than the floors of his home. Maybe the waxed paint on his car. Or the shine of the pole light on the fender of the car parked down the road. That car may as well have been a reptile with a demon astride, both skeletal, large knobby boned beings sheathed in a thin glistening white-gray leather than bunched and puckered when they turned to stare at his window. Whoever was in that car came at night to watch his house. Was he hallucinating? Why were they there? 

The creak and moan of the big farmhouse sang its unsettling song to the old man, the strong pre-storm winds enveloping it in a punishing caress.  Bullied air pushed through the seams and cracks of the white walls with a thin, keening trill, the kind made when an old man wheezes air out as he breathes. The house popped and snapped, the sounds of the relationship between a fashioned shelter and nature. 

He knew it wasn’t the wind keeping him from sleep; it was the feeling.  If he struggled out of bed, he knew it would be there; the gleam of the fender beneath the pole lamp down the road.  A car parked along the edge of TL Road 71.  It was always thirty feet back from the main road.  It would be there, the third time in a week.  Who was it?  

“Damn them,” he said to his companion. Stretched across the bed beside him was a long black cat, bigger than a small beagle.  The cat, Harry, now slept in the bed, replacing his dog who died a month ago, who replaced Ben’s wife who died two years ago.  For a second he remembered her smell-Ivory soap and fresh bread, the slight apple red of her cheeks, her small moans as they rocked together in this bed so many years ago. Barring being run over by a truck or stepped on by a cow, the old man thought the cat would soon have the bed to himself.

Parting the bedroom curtains, he saw the gleam, a curve of white laying on top of a gray fender, gray in the night, could be dark blue or dark green, not black.  Gray, maybe, he didn’t know. He was worried, no, frightened.  Who was that?  Tomorrow, he’d call the sheriff and put an end to this. 

***

The dispatcher said, “Sheriff, there’s a message for you.  It’s from Ben Tiley.  He called yesterday after you were gone.  Said someone was watching his house at night.  Said it might be communists.  He asked if communists were Catholics.  Said he thought communion was meant for communists.  When I reminded him even Methodists took communion, he told me to shut-up.  I wonder if he drinks?”  James Sullivan was the youngest deputy on the Madison County Sheriff’s Department, therefore condemned to be the dispatcher five days a week.  There were four other deputies in the department as well as the sheriff.  Bob Grey had been the sheriff of Madison County, Ohio for fourteen years.  The next election was two years away.  It would probably be his last, at least for this job.  He was considering running for the county commission instead.  Two more years as sheriff and four as a commissioner seemed a long time.  

“He’s just getting old. I’ll stop out to see him this afternoon.  He’ll be done with the milking and the dairy processors by then.  He’ll have his farm hands out on the job and be sitting in his office thinking about why the Russians would want to kidnap a seventy-eight year old dairy farmer.  By the time I get there, he’ll have worked out a good enough reason, I expect,” the sheriff said.  Looking at the other notes on his desk, he asked, “Did my mother call?”

“No sir, she didn’t, but your father called.  I told him you’d been called to help with a armed robbery investigation in Lancaster”

“What did he say to that?”

“He called me a liar and said I should be fired,” Sullivan said.

“That sounds about right,” the Grey said.

***

Sheriff Grey was having lunch at home when the phone rang.  His wife answered, hoping to fend off the caller so her husband could finish his meal.

“It’s Tim,” she said, placing her hand over the receiver.  “He sounds bad, like maybe he’s sick.  You’d better take this.”  Catherine Grey was a tall, blond women, a former softball player in college.  She met her husband at Mount Union, a small Methodist college in central Ohio, where they both played sports. He was a middle linebacker for a small school football program, she played intramural ball, a first baseman of some talent.  The men’s baseball coach caused a minor fuss when he told his own starting first baseman he could do a lot worse than play like Catherine Friddle.   They married two weeks after graduation.

“Sheriff, I think you’d better come to Ben Tiley’s farm.  Something’s happened and you need to see this,” Tim Wallace said.  Tim Wallace was the senior deputy in the department, having almost eighteen years of service.  

“What is it Tim?  I’m at lunch.”

“Ben’s dead, Sheriff; someone beat him to death.  I mean, you only know it’s him because of his belt buckle and that Masonic ring he always wears.  He’s in a corner, like he tried to hide.  It’s awful, God-damned awful.  You’d better come over here, okay?” Tim said, his voice quavering. 

“Make sure no one touches anything and call the coroner.  You on his house phone?” Grey asked.

“Yes sir, since it’s working, I thought I’d use it.  I looked to see if it was on the cradle, then just picked it up to listen for the tone.  It works,” Wallace said.

“Are you holding it with your handkerchief?”  

“Yessir.”

“Mary, are you listening?” the sheriff asked, knowing the switch board operator, Mary Gibson, was probably listening.  After a momentary silence, Mary said, “Yes sheriff.”

“Mary, I suppose you feel you can listen to our calls, since it’s public business, but I don’t want to find you’ve told anyone about this.  Do you understand?” he asked.

“Yes sheriff.”

“Good.  Tim, I’m on my way,” the sheriff said. Before leaving, he called his office and asked they call the state police and request they send an investigator to help with the crime scene.