Sam McCain - 02 - Wake Up Little Susie by Ed Gorman Page B

items was a box of forty-eight small spiral notebooks that fit nicely in my back pocket. Great for keeping notes during an investigation—z long as nobody saw the illustration with the Captain and his zap gun.
    Before I left the courthouse parking lot, I wrote three names on the first page of my fresh notebook:
     
    Mike Chalmers
    Todd Jensen
    Amy Squires
     
    I’d stopped by the parole office in the courthouse and gotten Chalmers’s address. He was living on an acreage where he worked part of a farm for a salary. Kepler, the parole officer, didn’t seem to have much faith in the man. “You know what the first thing he did was when he got out a few years ago?”
    “What?”
    “Cruised David Squires’s place.”
    “Squires tell you that?”
    “Squires didn’t have to. A cop did.
    He saw Chalmers out there several times and thought I should know about it. So I call Squires and warn him and I call Chalmers and try and scare him.”
    “He scare, did he?”
    “You know Chalmers pretty well?”
    “Pretty well.”
    “Well, then, whaddaya you think? You ever know anybody who could scare Chalmers?”
    I put the top down. Figured if I had to work, I might as well enjoy it. I
    was sixteen again. It’s funny how quickly you can get nostalgic. Here it was 1957 and I was looking back at 1952 as the Golden Age already. Senior year in high school. Somehow, it seemed a slower, gentler time. Beer parties at the sandpits. Dancing with Pamela on the boat that goes up and down the river all summer. Seeing my dad finally shake off the war. No more nightmares. No more depressions. The year 1952 was just about as perfect as a year could get.
    I was sitting at a stoplight when the black Ford convertible mysteriously appeared next to me.
    A beautiful blonde. Kim Novak. Head scarf. Shades. Radio blasting Buddy Holly. Revving the engine. Daring me to drag her. A smile that said we knew each other, disturbing without me understanding why. And then she was fishtailing and her tires were screaming and she was laying down a quarter block of rubber. And then she was gone.
     
    The acreage was scruffy, overgrown with weeds.
    Wire fences falling. Bottles and cans and papers littering the front yard. Windows crisscrossed with tape. A chimney that was little more than a pile of bricks atop a shingle-bare roof.
    From what I could see, Chalmers had himself what was essentially a tenant-farmer agreement. There were a lot of acres in the adjacent land given over to soybeans and even more given over to corn. In the distance along the horizon line you could see a new big blue silo, a new red barn, and a new white farmhouse. Whoever lived there was doing all right for himself. But he still had some back acres he wanted worked so he offered a subsistence wage and a faded frame two-story farmhouse and disintegrating outbuildings and told the tenant farmer, in this case Chalmers, to go to it. Miserable as the conditions were—I had the sense that there was electricity but no indoor plumbing, thus the outhouse in the backyard—it still had to beat being in prison.
    There was a rusty Ford pickup sitting at the end of the dirt drive. The house and the outbuildings looked even rougher close up, badly in need of washing and painting. A John Deere even older than the truck sat near the left-leaning barn.
    A sweet-faced border collie ran in sad useless circles before slowing down to take
    a look at me. All that frantic pointless energy.
    I got out. The border collie came over and growled. I put out my hand. She licked my fingers. I smiled at her and patted her head.
    She looked old and dusty and lost, a kind of quiet doggy sadness that can break your heart.
    I went to the back door. Knocked. No answer. I went to the side door. Knocked.
    No answer. I went to the front door.
    Knocked. And that’s when the girl came out.
    She was probably around twelve or thirteen, slender, shoulder-length blond hair with a tiny blue plastic barrette in it. Her flowered dress had