Scarecrow

Chapter 9, part 1

A full week passes before the next murder. In that time, Linda Sue is announced missing, Beauty is placed under a relentless curfew to catch the killer, and a humid heat wave comes to town in a roaring thunderstorm.

Lewis observes the rain from his office window, coffee cup in hand. He prefers disposable cups to mugs, for the simple reason that most, if not all, coffee mugs seem to bear one cutesy phrase or another around their circumference. He does not want cutesy phrases. He wants to drink straight black coffee and watch Jim Donnelly die.

Lewis's mental condition is deteriorating by the minute. Walt's corpse fills his eyelids when he closes them, and paranoia keeps them open the rest of the time. Through his sleepless nights, Lewis has cleverly deduced that the entire Beauty police force is onto him, along with a few select members of the rest of the town populace. Jurors, mostly. It's why he was so amazingly gleeful to hear that Miss Linda Sue had been reported missing after 24 hours by her neighbors. While a single cop car circled around town to investigate (there were too many men working on the Hendricks case to spare too many), Lewis had locked himself in his office to pump his fist in triumph. The old crone's disappearance would also provide the perfect distraction from Walt's murder if it began to lead back to him, while at the same time potentially eliminating a person who no doubt suspects him of his sin.

But now, back in his office a week after Linda Sue went missing, that excitement is fading. New and gaping holes in his plan are occuring to him by the hour– evidence he might have left behind, mistakes he could have avoided– and it is only a matter of time before they all lead back to him.

So, what can he do? Nothing at all. Any interference with the investigation would be a surefire way of being found out, making even the smallest move too risky to try just yet. So he is left with no other choice but to stew and smolder his demented anger away in the dusty coffin of his office, the walls closing in as suffocatingly as those of his own mind. It's no way to live, surely not how the sheriff of Beauty should be treated. Walt never had to put up with this. Walt was

(loved)

respected despite his total idiocy. Threw apple cores, propped his feet up for hours on end, spent half his day just spinning a football on his finger while chatting on the phone with Jim Donnelly on state time, and somehow earned the respect– reverence, for God's sake– of his men. If Lewis can't even trust those same officers and instead believes them all to be conspiring against him, how can he ever hope to fill Walt's shoes?

Sitting on the edge of his desk, Lewis looks down sharply at a faint, repeated tap, tap tapping noise. His hands are shaking so badly from his own inner musings that the coffee cup is but a white blur between them, and this is what is causing the noise. Lewis grunts and lets the cup fall to the linoleum floor, where it lies a sad, crumpled mess, jet-black liquid trickling slowly across the tiles from its open lid like

(blood everywhere and that gurgling sound he made when I)

a dark infection, dark as a murderous night in late June, dark as a dead man's eyes when his throat is slit as easily as a torn sheet of paper. Lewis Meyer sinks to his knees beside his spilt drink, head pounding with the torturous beating of a tell tale heart yet to be discovered.

By the end of the week, Lewis will have gone completely insane. But if he can be considered crazy, then Jim Donnelly has just gone off the deep end.

Eddie wakes up on Wednesday morning to the sound of screaming wood, one week after Linda Sue lost her life Marie Antoinette-style. Living on and/or near farmland for most of his life, Eddie can pick the noise out from almost anywhere, though this tends to be more of a curse than a gift. Whenever he hears what generations of farmers have dubbed "screaming wood," his mind goes straight to mulch being gnashed by gritted teeth, or something equally unpleasant. In short, it is the sound of something very old and very heavy being moved very roughly, a brutish, raucous noise, but not so unpleasant that he can't catch a few more minutes of sleep before the day's work must begin. Eddie turns over in his thin attic bed, eyes beginning to droop... and then sits bolt upright again as a deafening crash shakes the house to its foundation. Eddie jumps out of bed, too startled and intrigued to sleep now. He skips the stairs two at a time, Penny following close behind him from her bedroom in a hastily-donned bathrobe, the sleep not yet gone from her bleary eyes.
He throws open the front door as another crash rings out, more distant this time, followed by the tinkling of broken glass. A warm gust of daybreak air dashes against his face as he runs, barefoot, off the porch, scanning the fields for the source of the noise. His right foot lands momentarily on a slightly elevated mound of fresh wet earth at the edge of the corn stalks, but he pays it no heed in his haste, and perhaps understandably so. If he had known what lay buried beneath the soil, however, he would have forgotten all about the awful clatter long enough to uncover it, or to simply get violently sick right in front of his lover.