Small Town Trouble Read online

  SMALL TOWN TROUBLE

  A Mystery by Jean Erhardt

  Published 2013 by Jean Erhardt

  ©2013 Jean Erhardt

  Cover art by Sara Erhardt

  Jean Erhardt on Facebook:

  https://www.facebook.com/jean.erhardt.1

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  JeanErhardt.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission, except for brief quotations to books and critical reviews. This story is a work of fiction. Characters and events are the product of the author’s imagination. Any

  resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  About the Author

  Dedication

  For Linda, with love and gratitude

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank my darling Linda for her steadfast love, support and sacrifices. I also wish to thank my parents, John and Ruth Erhardt, my sister, Sara, my brother, Johnny, my editor, Stacey Kirk, my teachers, Andrea Carlisle, Joyce Thompson, the late Ron Abell, Joy Williams, Gordon Lish and my fourth grade teacher, Miss Nina Lou Leeds. And, finally, the Wild Girls of Amelia High School and Maryville College.

  If lovin’ you is wrong I don’t wanna be right

  If being right means being without you

  I’d rather live a wrong doing life

  – Homer Banks, Carl Hampton & Raymond Jackson

  Stax Records

  Chapter 1

  It was high summer, the peak of tourist season in Gatlinburg, Tennessee where I should’ve been. But instead, I was on my way to Tara to kick Scarlett O’Hara’s butt.

  My mother wasn’t actually Scarlett O’Hara, but this wasn’t news I wanted to break to her. Deep in her heart and much to her dismay, Evelyn Claxton Claypoole knew that she wasn’t the star of Gone with the Wind. This was kind of a shame because my mother did Vivien Leigh better than Vivien Leigh. And, at least for the time being, she had the house to back up her act. My mother’s version of Scarlett’s Tara looked like a scaled-down model of the plantation as architecturally conceived by The Beverly Hillbillies. Suitcase in hand, I knocked on the massive front door.

  “Hey, Mom, it’s me.”

  I figured she’d never hear me over the blaring TV, so I went on in. Bunky, my mother’s aging Pekingese, jumped off the sofa where he’d been relaxing and watching the five o’clock news with my mother. Evelyn had an ice pack parked on her head. Headaches were no strangers to her. They were often brought on by her consumption of too many Manhattans.

  Yammering his head off, Bunky charged for me, but, because he’s about a hundred and fifty years old, he only got about a foot in my general direction.

  “Bunky, hush your mush,” Evelyn said, showing her Dixie roots. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you recognize Kimberly? Well, I’m not surprised. It has been forever.”

  “Hello, Mother,” I said, dumping my bags in the Rhett Butler foyer. I hated it when she called me Kimberly.

  I headed over to where she rather dramatically reclined on the couch and hugged her. At five feet ten inches, I had almost a foot on my mother as she is a Pygmy. Much easier to hug her when she is horizontal.

  “I see we’re in blonde mode again.”

  “Clairol’s Sahara Blonde.”

  “You’re starting to look like Ellen DeGeneres minus the piercing blue eyes.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “But why so short?”

  “You don’t like my utilitarian hair by Super Cuts?”

  “Too short.”

  “Sharon Stone’s is shorter.”

  Evelyn snorted. “Yeah, and she’s weirder than skvitch.”

  I ignored that remark and Evelyn went on to her next random thought.

  “Maybe I should get a box of that. What would you think of me as a blonde?”

  “I’m sure you’d look stunning.”

  “Bet I would. Anyway, I thought you’d fallen off the face of the earth,” my mother said. “How about a cookie?” She offered me the box of SnackWells.

  I passed on the cookies. I’d just enjoyed a high fat lunch with Colonel Sanders down the road and didn’t want to confuse my body chemistry. I was one of those lucky people who, no matter what they shoveled into their mouths, never gained an ounce. I remained lanky, even athletic looking, long after college.

  “Your mother is not gonna to be around forever, you know. You oughta get home more often.”

  “You are absolutely right, Mother. I’ll make a point of it.”

  I wasn’t up for an altercation over this much-aired complaint, so I went along with it. My mother sat up suddenly and set her ice pack aside. “Did you hear about the murder we had right here in Fogerty?”

  “Get out of here.” Murder in Fogerty?

  “Yep. Remember Jimmy Jacobs who owned that topless joint? Got his throat slit. Didn’t you go to school with him?”

  “Sure did. A real loser.”

  “Well, he’s a dead loser now. Say, I’ll bet you could use a little drink. I know I sure could.”

  “Not a bad idea,” I said, and it wasn’t.

  I headed downstairs to the bar where I freshened Evelyn’s ice pack and made us both Manhattans, mine with an extra cherry. I was having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that there had been a murder in Fogerty and then I got lost in the ambience of the basement bar still had A.C. written all over it. Cheap booze, a neat line of Cincinnati Reds bar glasses, novelty ashtrays and a shrunken head that probably belonged in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.

  My uncle A.C. was my mother’s late second husband who also happened to be my deceased father’s brother. Evelyn claimed that A.C. was the only Claypoole who knew how to have a good time, and she and A.C. had spent their marriage proving it. They’d built Tara II, a huge, pillared monstrosity on a man-made lake so large A.C. had had to call in practically every piece of heavy equipment in town to dig it out. Then, it took water trucks from four counties to fill it. On its completion, A.C. christened Lake Evelyn and tossed my mother off the dock. By all reports, this was a very romantic moment.

  Over time, A.C. and my mother had sold off my father’s businesses to support themselves in the style to which they had grown accustomed. They’d been to Disneyworld about a zillion times. They’d vacationed in countries they couldn’t even spell. They made numerous trips to the South Pacific to vi
sit my brother Clint and his wife Sugar where they were serving the Lord as Baptist missionaries.

  But fate hadn’t been kind to A.C. One afternoon he was fishing on Lake Evelyn in his new 22-foot aluminum bass boat when a storm blew up out of nowhere. A.C. had never been one to let the weather ruin his day. But this time it definitely did when a big, ugly lightning bolt struck him, and he tumbled dead into the lake.

  Sometimes I missed A.C., but not usually.

  “To you and you.” I toasted A.C.‘s memory and the shriveled head dangling over the bar. What a terrific couple of guys.

  Chapter 2

  Just two days before, I’d been at the restaurant, The Little Pigeon, which Mad Ted Weber and I owned. I was sampling some stinky cheeses with a particularly disgusting food rep when my mother called with the news about the offer on the radio station. WFOG was the last of my late father’s businesses. At one time Cal Claypoole had owned a large chunk of Fogerty, which wasn’t actually saying much. Fogerty was your basic rural southern Ohio town where people still eat squirrel and the American Dream has been living on life support longer than anyone cares to remember. But my father was a big fish in a little pond, and, at the end, his kingdom included the bowling alley, a trailer park, a strip mall, a gladiola farm and WFOG, the local country radio station.

  I thought my mother might have been hallucinating on low-fat cookies or at least confused about the number of zeroes, but, sure enough, a guy named Larry White from Nashville had offered her a quarter million dollars for WFOG.

  I knew that country music had been rapidly gaining in popularity, but WFOG was merely a cinder block building in a hay field with a signal that reached about as far as Bunky could run on a hot day.

  Unbelievably, Evelyn was in a quandary over the WFOG offer. “But A.C. loved country music and that radio station. How can I sell it?”

  “Mother,” I said, trying not to squeal like a pig, “be reasonable. We’re talking about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a station that’s been in the red longer than Tammy Wynette sang Stand By Your Man.”

  “But, Kimberly, it’s the principle of the thing.”

  “Evelyn,” I said, almost dropping the phone, “there is no principle of the thing here.” I was clearly starting to squeal. I took a deep breath and dropped back a few yards in an effort to regain my composure.

  “I just don’t know,” said Evelyn, The Ever Indecisive.

  I knew right then it was time for a road trip in a northerly direction, and some gentle but persuasive butt kicking.

  “Ask Mr. Whatshisname from Nashville to make a formal offer. Tell him you’ll review it with your attorney. I can be there day after tomorrow. And, Evelyn, please don’t do anything else until I get there.”

  “I don’t have an attorney.”

  What she was probably leaving out was anymore.

  “A detail, Mother.”

  I couldn’t imagine why anybody would want to hand over that kind of money for WFOG, but the offer had godsend written all over it. And it was probably Evelyn’s last shot at saving her rear.

  “Clint said he’d ask God to give me wisdom to make the right decision. He’s so sweet. Isn’t he sweet?”

  “That’s Clint.” Sweet wasn’t the first modifier that came to mind when I thought of my brother, but hell, if Clint or anybody else wanted to pray for Evelyn, I was all for it. And the sooner the better.

  Even with this new and encouraging turn of events that had been the impetus for my trip to Fogerty, I wasn’t quite ready to get into the thick of things with Evelyn over her rapidly eroding finances. I decided that our business chat could wait until the next day.

  “Cheers,” I said, and we sipped our Manhattans in the living room while the air conditioner hummed. We covered the weather, the Cincinnati Reds, Clint’s newly hatched case of hemorrhoids and Bunky’s dry skin problem. From there, the conversation took another downward spiral.

  Evelyn complained about how hard it was to meet a nice man at her age and how much she missed my father and A.C.

  “Don’t end up alone like me in your old age.”

  Evelyn had never been a robust supporter of my alternative lifestyle, as it was commonly and stupidly known. With my wicked ways, she was sure I’d end up solitaire, breast stroking around in circles at the bottom of the Well of Loneliness. My mother still couldn’t say the word “lesbian,” but she had come to grasp the general concept that, after all these years, this was no phase I was going through. Even my brother Clint had stopped sending me those “Jesus Loves You Anyway” pamphlets.

  At dinner time I checked Evelyn’s refrigerator and, amazingly, found enough edible ingredients to make an omelet and a salad. Evelyn wasn’t famous for her culinary wizardry. In fact, I think she existed mainly on SnackWells and Manhattans. It was close to a miracle to run across lettuce and eggs.

  I set the table and uncorked a bottle of chilled white wine I’d retrieved earlier from my stash. A long time ago I’d learned never to venture far from home without taking along drinkable wine. This was especially true if my destination happened to be Fogerty.

  Evelyn said she enjoyed her dinner, although I know she probably would have been just as happy with a bowl of cereal. Anyway, it was nice to see her get some protein. After dinner, I loaded the dishwasher while Evelyn went upstairs to take a bubble bath in her heart-shaped tub. Then Bunky and I ate a bowl of frozen yogurt and watched the local news which was always a mind-bending experience.

  Naturally, the news highlight was the topless tavern murder story. Not only had redneck sleazoid Jimmy Jacobs gotten his throat slit in his own parking lot, he’d somehow he’d managed to lose his genitalia in the scuffle. Fogerty’s finest hadn’t figured out who’d done it yet, which was no great surprise.

  After all of the mind bending I could take, I excused myself and retired to the Ashley Wilkes bedroom. I hung up a few things from my suitcase, brushed my teeth and got comfy on the immense four-poster bed. Then, against all good reason, I called Nancy Merit.

  No answer. I hung up and punched in the number for the TV station. I was hoping that Nancy would be working late. It wasn’t a real long shot. When the Southern belle on the night switchboard picked up, I said in a no-nonsense, businesslike fashion, “Nancy Merit, please.”

  “May I say who’s calling?”

  “Sure, Martina Navratilova.”

  “One moment, please,” she purred, then proceeded to put me on hold for at least ten minutes. Finally, she came back on the line.

  “I’m sorry, but Ms. Merit isn’t available.” The operator didn’t know how right she was. “Is there a message, or would you like Ms. Merit’s voice mail?”

  Decisions, decisions. I opted for Nancy’s voice mail where I left a mildly provocative message of a sensual nature. I hoped Nancy would retrieve the message instead of her personal assistant, Shirley, who already knew more about Nancy and me than I did.

  I had dated off and on over the past couple of years, but nobody had revved my engine like Nancy Merit. I could barely keep my hands off of her when we were together. She made me tingle in places I’d forgotten existed.

  I left Nancy my mother’s number and tried to sound casual about it. Despite our recent decision to take a little breakie-poo from one another, I was really hoping that Nancy would feel like talking, too.

  This thing with Nancy Merit had gotten a little crazy. Not that it didn’t start out that way, but a bit of a breather was probably best for both of us.

  My friends had warned me from the beginning that I was off my beam to get involved with Nancy. Not only was she obsessed with her popular TV show, Nancy Merit’s House, she was also known within the circles of the inner sanctum as a hopeless closet case with a savage penchant for breaking hearts. Then there was the small matter that Nancy was quite married, although lately I’d come to regard this as a technicality. Just about everyone I knew wondered how I’d hooked up with a woman who was as preoccupied and unlikable as Nancy Merit. I’d actually w
ondered this myself from time to time. But I didn’t wonder for long because maybe it said more about me than I wanted to know. Besides, I liked unlikable people. In fact, my best friend Mad Ted Weber could be one of the most annoying, petty, self-absorbed people you’d ever want to meet. But he could make a mean rabbit stew and he always had a good bottle of wine around.

  For the past few months, Nancy and I had been speeding full throttle over the high and lusty seas of romance. That is when we could work in the time. Neither of us was sure what should happen next, or if there even was a next. What I knew shouldn’t happen next was a head-on collision with Dickhead, Nancy’s unbelievably irritating and repulsive husband. Dickhead was one of the main money players behind the hideous overdevelopment of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, the gateway to the Gateway of the Smoky Mountains. As of late, he’d been hinting around that he was on to Nancy’s philandering, not that you’d think he would have time to notice given his own rather hectic philandering schedule.

  I was of the opinion that jealousy was the driver here. What was really getting under Dickhead’s skin was the fact that he could no longer ignore Nancy’s runaway popularity and billowing success. She’d just hired a full-time secretary who spent a great portion of her time handling fan mail from Nancy’s adoring public. Nancy Merit’s House, once a local show, had gone on to cable TV. Nancy’s book, Nancy Merit Style, was selling vigorously and she’d just landed a juicy contract for two more books.