Nightcrawlers

15

After they said their good-byes to Elena Blasden, getting a sour look in return, they dropped Hyder at the Ezren farm so he could attend to his search parties. Kenney and Godfrey drove over to Haymarket and the sheriff’s department where there was something the sheriff wanted Kenney to see.

In Godfrey’s office, once the door was shut and coffee was poured, Kenney sat there and waited for it. Because he knew it was coming and that it wouldn’t be good. Whatever in the Christ it was, it would not be good.

Godfrey dug through the bottom drawer of a locked file cabinet and came out with a large manila envelope. He held it in both hands, keeping his eyes on it… like maybe he was afraid of what might come crawling out. “I’ve had this post a long time, Lou,” he said, not exactly happy about the idea. “I’ve been sheriff here a good many years and I was a deputy sheriff before that. Somehow, I get reelected each term and I accept the job and mainly because I’m too damn old to know anything else but law work. Sometimes, though, I hope I’ll get voted out of office.”

“But you don’t?”

Godfrey shook his head. “No, I don’t. And sometimes I wonder if it’s because I’m doing such a fantastic job… which I doubt… or if it’s because I carry a big broom, keep this goddamn county clean. Sweep up all the dirt and keep it hidden away from the taxpayers and tourists.”

Kenney just looked at him. “What the hell do you mean?”

“I mean, in this county, being a good cop isn’t quite enough, Lou. This job, this post, it asks a lot more of a man than that. It asks him to be the keeper of all the dirty secrets the county cannot or will not admit even to itself. All the filthy, unpleasant things nobody wants to talk about.” He dropped the manila envelope in front of Kenney. “And it’s always been that way, God help us. Always. So I carry that broom and I do the sweeping, keep the county sparkling, make damn sure nothing awful crawls out in the sunlight where folks might see it and ask questions.”

Kenney looked down at the big manila envelope. “And this?”

“What you have there is a file kept by my predecessor, a man named Albert Susskind. Susskind was just another garbage collector like yours truly, as was the man before him and the man before him and so on.” Godfrey went to the window, looked out at the gray, moist afternoon, the raindrops rolling down the pane. “That file there has been handed down, sheriff to sheriff, since before the First World War. I heard tell there was another file before it… but it’s long gone and that’s just fine with me.”

Kenney sucked in a breath, let it out. Carefully then, he opened the envelope, dumped out its contents on the sheriff’s desk. For the next five minutes, he perused them while a knot of something twisted in his belly. Yeah, here it was, just as Godfrey had alluded to, all the county’s dirty laundry. All the things people maybe suspected or gossiped about, but could not prove… and maybe they preferred things that way.

Kenney was beginning to think he might have preferred that, too.

For campfire stories and old wives’ tales were easy enough to dismiss, easy enough to tuck in a box and throw up on some dusty closet shelf in your mind. But what Kenney was looking at, this was something else again. What he had was a devil’s stew of newspaper clippings, police reports, missing persons files, crime scene notations, and coroner’s reports. Assorted photocopied magazine articles and even a few pages from books to round things out. The most recent were twenty-odd years old and the oldest dated back to before Prohibition.

The newspaper clippings were mostly from the Haymarket Weekly Mirror, the Sawyer County Record, and the Ashland Daily Press.

He began to read…