TERRYVILLE MAKES THE NEWS
I’ve used the word “scared” so often, so thoughtlessly, in my lifetime. This time was different.
We had a Facebook group, maybe 75 members, which was a significant portion of the adults in our little town. The Entering Terryville sign claims 2,224 but I know we don’t have two thousand, and fifteen hundred might be a stretch. Small towns certainly don’t need Facebook groups but somebody started it and a bunch of us signed on and we almost always played nice. The late Arthur Terry had given the town its name decades before the internet but he would have liked the idea because he would have sold more stuff if he had the web. As it was, he’d sold sufficient amounts of real estate and cemetery plots and pocket watches to amass an enormous sum of money. His descendants lived far away, most of them now in beach towns, basking in monthly annuity checks that found their way into bank accounts as if by magic. Even here, without a bank in town, and also without Terry-like riches, I was able to do all my transactions online.
It was only nine years since I’d found my way here so I was still considered a new guy. Another decade or so and I’d be fully accepted. Accepted, but far from the inner circle, and I’d be approaching eighty by then, assuming I lived to tell the tale. Those guys inside the circle waved and called out to me across the floor of the café but I didn’t sit with them. It wasn’t done. Sometimes, I had one on one conversations but that was all.
Terryville was a tucked-away town completely missed by highways and construction booms. We were ninety miles from the city and only two or three of us did that trip on a daily basis. We had an elementary school, a town hall, a lending library, one grocery/liquor store, two restaurants and four bars. And the coffee shop. Sometimes little towns get both what they need and what they deserve and this café was a gift to all of us. I walked there most mornings and often returned for a second round in the late afternoon. Others logged more time than me. Some never left.
I don’t even care about coffee. It kept me awake in graduate school, so thank you for that, but I don’t drink it now. I can’t really, because it makes me jump like a baby rabbit, but I am grateful for it because I am a beneficiary of whatever it is that makes people need coffee, coffee, coffee. Let them drink away because I do like my café. Sometimes for tea, sometimes for hot chocolate, and almost always a cinnamon roll.
I hadn’t thought much about the Facebook thing until Alice, who lives on the other side of the creek from me, posted it on the page, but it’s true what someone once told me: The page and group were our local newspaper. We were too small to have one of our own and anything that happened here, not that much did, rarely - in the never sense of rarely - made the pages of the city rag. I still subscribed to said rag, but even before I’d opened it this morning I’d gone online and seen Alice’s post, which was nothing but a link to page six of the paper I’d just carried in from the foot of my driveway. A link and the accompanying headline:
Terryville Man Arrested in 25-Year Old Cold Case Murder
Imagine such a headline. I was afraid to touch the rubber band, much less slide it away from the newsprint. The tangle of its predecessors rested between the toaster and the fridge but I couldn’t pry this one off. How could I? We didn’t make the paper often, as I’ve said, but what if it was someone I knew? How could it not?
That was just the paper. The link remained on the screen, closer and quicker.
If I watched television I’d know more about cold cases, but I’d wisely tossed the old set during the last move. I did remember that because they need your DNA to make the connections, most guys caught had been convicted of something else in the interim, and the something else was usually a sex crime. But maybe I was making that up in the confabulations of my mind, my mind that was hurting because it hadn’t been thinking about anything at all until I went to the Facebook page, but I think it’s correct. Which meant, at this point, was that whoever my neighbor was, and whether or not he was the guy in the murder from a quarter-century ago, he had an ugly, ugly blot on his resume.
I’d never heard of a murder here, even from twenty-five years ago, but the killing didn’t have to have been here. It was the murderer – and/or the sex criminal -- who was one of us, if the headline, and the cops, had it right.
The paper was on the wicker stool I keep just inside the front door. My laptop screen had faded but the link was two clicks away. I walked from the desk into the kitchen and ran the water, warm but not hot. I washed my hands, splashed water on my face, scrubbed the sweat off my forehead, and went back to the door. I avoided the paper, filled my pockets with keys, wallet and phone, and began the ten minute walk to the café.
I wondered who might be missing.
About: Tony Press lives near San Francisco and tries to pay attention. See Blink/Ink; BorderSenses; Boston Literary; Doorknobs & BodyPaint; 5x5; Foundling Review; Grey Sparrow Journal; Halfway Down the Stairs; JMWW; Journal of Microliterature; Linnet’s Wings; Literary Orphans; MacGuffin; Menda City Review; Rio Grande Review; riverbabble; SFWP Journal; Switchback; Toasted Cheese; Workers Write; and more. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
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