Damn Straight by Elizabeth Sims

Author:Elizabeth Sims [Sims, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780983663911
Published: 2003-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

Pearl Center, Illinois, pop. 2,560, is 63.8 miles north-northwest of the Alamo rental car lot at O'Hare airport. At that distance, it's stayed out of reach of the suburban creep that has made places like Northbrook, Lombard, and Downer's Grove into extensions of places like Evanston, Villa Park, and Oak Park.

The utter flatness of the terrain heading out from the airport gives you a clue as to what lies beyond, as you segue from the Pizza Huts to the places that used to be Pizza Huts but are now used sewing-machine shops. It's farm country; it's Farm Aid country, where people eventually stop fixing the motor on the RV and just let the weeds grow. Little welfare office on the prairie. A gray place, an uneasy place, it felt to me.

Pearl Center's motto, I read on the sign at the town limit, is, "Honoring the Past, Envisioning the Future." Anything to avoid a hard look at the present, I thought.

It was nine in the morning and, despite the dreariness and the wet March thaw, I was feeling fairly wholesome. I'd eaten a good solid breakfast of bacon and eggs at the terminal and was ready to implement Operation Save Genie Maychild.

In Pearl Center, which hugs the banks of an apparently nameless small river, there were five taverns, four stoplights, three churches, two police cars, and one newspaper.

Every small newspaper office is different in every detail from every other one, yet they are all exactly alike. That is, you will find different people working there, different stories on the layout boards, different advertisements, different contact names in the stacks of press releases, a different brand of sugar cubes at the coffee shrine—yet the smell and sound and feel of the place is like that of any other you've been in: You're aware of the stale coffee, carpet lint, printer toner, hand soap; you're aware of the low clamor of plastic keyboards, voices on the telephone, the odd crinkle of a candy wrapper, the jingle of coins dumped onto the front counter by a carrier.

If you've worked in the business, you can also walk in and tell what day of the week it is, whether the issue's just gone out to the printer, or just about to go out, or somewhere in between. You can feel it in people's voices, in the tension of their movements.

I'd noticed that the Pearl Center Bugle published on Thursdays. That was good for me; Friday, then, was a day of nothing pressing.

Skip Doots, staff correspondent, heard me ask for him in the front office and came bounding out to meet me.

"Hi there, Theresa. Good to meetcha!" His grip was sweaty but firm.

"Skip, how do you do? Good to meet you, too." I liked him instantly, knowing that ninety-nine percent of reporters would've waited in their office for the receptionist to get up, come in, and announce me. Then seventy percent of them would've stayed seated behind their desks while she showed me in. I also liked his title, staff correspondent: just a trifle over the top for Pearl Center, Illinois.

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