Theory of the Case by T. R. Pearson

Author:T. R. Pearson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Barking Mad Press
Published: 2019-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

Things Socratic

i

Saluda, Virginia, is nowhere much, south of the Rappahannock River, gateway to Deltaville, which is kind of nowhere squared. We showed up with a list of Pyles and an appointment at the Middlesex County courthouse where a woman named Millie helped us out in spite of what we were — two uncredentialed adults, one loud-mouth millennial in a wheelchair, and one teen we’d pulled out of school for the day. He was missing gym and something called World Portal.

“Why Pyles?” Millie wanted to know.

“Family tree stuff,” Ev informed her. Then he dug a junky video camera out of his sack and said to Millie, “We’re YouTubing it.”

“Oh?”

Ev nodded. He wheeled in closer for a more confidential chat, and me and Gus and Dwight pulled back a touch so those two could have a moment.

Millie knew actual Pyles herself and claimed to have some memory of Ranger Randy. “Bony thing. His people come from up by Urbanna. Lived with an aunt. I’m pretty sure that was him.”

“She still around?” Ev asked. Now he was videoing Millie.

“Think so.” She knew what records to check and so did some scouring for us. She licked her lips and fixed her hair, jotted down an Urbanna address.

They had one of those old-timey Tastee Freezes on the north edge of Saluda that sold footlongs and a shake with Heath Bars in it, so we stopped off for a consult and a dose of gastric distress.

“What’s the plan?” I asked and got the look I’d anticipated, not from any one of them but from all of them together. They didn’t do plans but depended instead on free-form improvisation and occasionally even the homely truth. Plans like mine got me in Dutch with the Leonards of the world, and I was well aware of my personal history of considered schemes going sideways.

Dwight was working his way through a chili dog, had orange grease up to his eye sockets. Gus proved content to make a plan for him. “Diarrhea,” she said.

It didn’t turn out that way exactly, at least not immediately. Dwight just complained and gurgled all the way up to Urbanna where no amount of technology would help us find Ranger Randy’s aunt’s house. It turned out it had been bulldozed and the aunt had been shifted into a planned community called River View, even though you could only hope to see the Rappahannock if you climbed a tree.

The woman lived in a shoebox-shaped manufactured home like everybody else in the place. They all had holly bushes and nandinas, identical faux-colonial light posts, and cars parked (in the Virginia way) all over the damn place.

Randy Pyle’s aunt was about to be on her way somewhere when we finally tracked her down. Book club, and they were supposed to have read Lord Jim, but Ranger Randy’s aunt had only gotten through a third, and she’d been tapped at the last minute to lead the discussion because Evelyn, she informed us, had bailed.

“Phlebitis my ass,” was how Ranger Randy’s aunt put it.

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