Mystery in Wet Swamp – Chapter One

(By the Mystery Writer)

Most of Tom Ryan’s high school classmates left Wet Swamp soon after they graduated, a grand tradition, so why was he still there, Tom asked himself.

He finished his eggs, grits and ham breakfast at Miller’s Restaurant, surrounded by older couples enjoying brunch after First United Methodist and Second Baptist Sunday services. The men fidgeted with their ties, uncomfortable in their suits, while their wives sat prim and proper in their pastel print dresses. Several of the ladies wiped off their silverware with paper napkins. A young mother spoon fed her daughter sitting in a high chair, while her husband sipped his coffee, telling her he wanted to get home soon and didn’t want to miss the kick off of the Buc’s game.

“Happy Birthday,” Tom mumbled to himself. Thirty years old and still changing tires and oil at Roy’s Tire Exchange, a job he’s had since he graduated high school. He took a few classes at Jackson Community College out on University Drive and planned to go onto the UF or FSU. But like most things in his twenties, he left college undone (a real disappointment, he knew, for his parents).

Thirty. Flecks of gray were already taking root in his brown hair. He lived alone, renting an efficiency above the Wet Whistle Bar two blocks south from Miller’s.  A good way to avoid a DUI.  How did I get so old he thought, hearing Freddie Fender’s “Wasted days and Wasted Nights” playing in his head.

Beatrice, a fixture at Miller’s, refilled his coffee.

“What’s with you today, daydreamer?” she asked, brushing back a strand of her bleached hair. “You look like you’re a million miles away with no way home.”

“More like a million years,” Tom said, smiling weakly. He finished his coffee and left Beatrice a dollar, a big tip by Wet Swamp standards.

He walked out into the glare of Broadway Street. Another muggy summer day in Florida. Millie Myers swept the sidewalk in front of her antique shop. He nodded her a hello. She waved back and smiled. Millie stayed open until 2 p.m. on Sundays, hoping Miller’s customers might meander over to her store. Few ever did. Millie’s shop itself might be better described as a glorified second-hand store than an antique shop. But that’s Wet Swamp. Great expectations that never come.

In New York, Broadway was known as the “Great White Way.” Wet Swamp’s Broadway was also a White Way — if you count how the Klu Klux Klan marched in the town’s Fourth of July parades in the 1950s. The local Klan members packed away their sheets after the FBI clamped down on Klansmen during the Civil Rights Movement. Some traditions, however, don’t quite die out. Jimmy Bill Boyers makes it his tradition on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day to race down Broadway Street flying the Stars and Bars from the bed of his battered pickup.  Any idea out of that head, would need a rear access road to find its way into your brain Tom once told Jimmy Bill, who was built like a circus bear with a buzz cut, just before the two duked it out after a high school football game. Shorter and thinner than Jimmy Bill, Tom managed to get in a few good shots before Jimmy Bill clipped him with a hard blow to his left temple, leaving him dazed to eat dirt and the laughter of the gang of teens who gathered for the fight.

“Yankee bastard,” Jimmy Bill whispered to him with a smirk.

Tom wondered how much Jimmy Bill smirks now, living as he does in his banged up single-wide on the edge of town. Jimmy Bill takes the odd jobs people throw him, never anything steady. He works hard until lunch hour but is pretty much useless after that, usually downing at least three beers from the six pack that he usually keeps in a cooler in the back of his pickup. A week after high school graduation, he married Bella Buford, already two months pregnant with their first boy, a kid meaner than the pit bull they keep chained to a tree. Their second son, skinny as a stick, twitches and never looks anyone in the eye. Tom saw Bella about a month ago. She looked pregnant again with their third child, but it’s getting harder to tell.

Already noon. Tom’s parents expected him to drop by later in the afternoon so they could celebrate his birthday. They only lived five blocks from Broadway. He’d surprise them by showing up early. He didn’t have much else to do.

Standing by the Hill Blocks View sign, three Thompson Groves tractor-trailers barreled through the intersection of Broadway and Route 27. Tom waited for the traffic signal to change, took one step off the curb, but caught from the corner of his eye, a hot pink Mustang convertible, top down, racing through the red light. He fell back, landing on his ass. Turning, he saw a long-hair blonde and her personalized Florida license, “YIELD.” Jennifer Thompson was the eldest of B.T. Thompson’s two daughters. Tom thought he heard her laugh. The girl should wear a warning sign: dangerous curves.

Nothing changes in Wet Swamp, Tom thought to himself. Four generations of Thompsons ruled over the county like plantation masters and still do since they own a third of it and keep most of its residents on their payroll. According to the family’s official story, John Adam, the patriarch, slipped down to Florida from South Carolina during the early days of Civil War after fighting with Stonewall Jackson. Some suspect John Adam was a Confederate deserter, but that’s something no one in Wet Swamp dares say aloud. It was John Adam who first named Wet Swamp because of the wetlands that fed a small dishpan lake even in the driest of seasons. When Wet Swamp Chamber of Commerce wanted to rename the town to something more attractive sounding to tourists, B.T. killed the effort. He wouldn’t let shopkeepers disrespect his family.

Byron, his parent’s border collie, was the first to greet Tom with barks as he climbed up the steps of their front porch. Like many of the older Wet Swamp homes built long before air conditioning, his parent’s house had a wide front porch, now with ceiling fans considered antique, and plenty of windows to catch the lightest of breezes from any direction. The street was shaded with old oaks draped in Spanish moss.

“Jim, Thomas is here,” his mother shouted, tightly gripping and pulling him into the house so she could give him a big hug.

“Happy birthday,” she said holding his hand and guiding him into the kitchen.

His father ambled into the kitchen, like always, with a book in one hand and a coffee cup in the other. “Happy birthday, son. Is there any coffee left, Ruth?”

Ruth pointed to the coffee maker with its half pot of cold coffee.

“Thirty years old,” his father said, taking off his bifocals, holding his glasses up to the light and wiping the lens clean with a paper napkin his mother kept on the table. “Geez, does this mean you’re trying to make me an old man?”

Now retired, Jim Ryan taught English at Wet Swamp’s middle school, his first and only job after graduating from NYU. If you asked him why he stayed at the school, he’d tell you how his students needed him. Some of his students called him Yankee Man, not exactly a term of endearment, but he was fair and never failed a student for trying to keep up with the assignments. “Give students D’s for doing it,” he always said. Jim Ryan still taught occasionally as an adjunct instructor – “intellectual day labor” – he called it at the community college. Ruth, also a NYU graduate, worked for years as a social worker, mostly qualifying families for food stamps and Medicaid. She, too, felt needed, sometimes too needed. They spent most of their time now fishing and picnicking at Wet Swamp’s Lake Park, or gardening, reading or volunteering at the town’s small library. Once a year, Tom’s parents would take off, visiting his older brother and sister — Roger, a land use attorney in Jacksonville, and Beatrice, a biology high school teacher in a Chicago suburb. Spending two or three weeks on the road, his parents liked to meander, taking in sights along the way, mostly side trips to historic sites.

“Thirty years old, so what do you have planned?” his father asked. “This is a hallmark birthday.”

“To have dinner with you,” Tom said. His mother smiled.

For most of the evening, they kept conversations light, not triggering any testy debates, like what Tom expected to do with the rest of his life. Over dinner, his father talked about rereading Faulkner with a new appreciation for his writing. Always the teacher. His mother talked about their new neighbors who moved several weeks ago into the Ringer House across the street. The two-story house was built in the early 1900s by Dr. Henry Ringer, Wet Swamp’s first doctor. He and his family lived on the second floor and he worked out of an office on the first floor. The Ringer House stood empty since the last family to rent it moved to Tampa seven or eight years ago.

“I haven’t met any of them yet,” his mother said of her new neighbors. “Actually, I haven’t even seen any of them to welcome them to the neighborhood. Very quiet people. But I imagine they have a lot to do. No one kept the house up, so they could be busy making repairs. I’m sure we’ll meet whenever they’re ready.”

After dinner, his mother brought out a cake she baked with three candles sitting atop a mound of chocolate icing. His parents sang “Happy Birthday” deliberately off key — which wasn’t hard since neither could sing.

Slicing the cake, his mother asked, “How’s Mary Ellen doing?”

“I suppose she’s doing well,” Tom said.

He and Mary Ellen first dated when she was a high school junior and he was senior. A year after he graduated, they had a pregnancy scare when her period was late, very late. Tom still chafed with embarrassment after all these years, when he recalled how he reacted not giving her all the support and assurances she needed. The scare proved to be just that, a scare. Although they still cared for each other, their relationship never recovered fully.  The two would continue to see each other off and on, but nothing steady or quite as serious as before. Soon after the scare, Mary Ellen, now an LPN at Dr. Kingston’s Wet Swamp Clinic, went on the pill and he made sure he used a condom whenever the two did make love.

Now that his mother mentioned it, Tom did wonder why he hadn’t heard from Mary Ellen. They always called each other on their birthdays. She knew his cell phone number, but she often left birthday messages on his house phone.

The summer thunderheads were rolling over Wet Swamp later than usual this year, and Sunday’s storm proved to be a real palmetto pounder. Tom waited out the storm sitting on his parents’ front porch. His father and Byron joined him. His father handed him a beer, and the two watched the winds whip a wall of rain down the street, shaking leaves off the trees. Lightning cracked close to the house, causing the lights to flicker but not go completely out. Byron grumbled with each lightning flash, but his father was able to calm the dog by scratching behind its ears. The hard rains lasted more than twenty minutes. Tom and his father both gave the storm a B-plus, grading on a curve of summer storms. As the rains slowed to a steady pour, his father suggested he spend the night, but Tom said he had to work early. Besides, he didn’t feel it was good karma to start the third decade of his life waking up in his boyhood bedroom. His father patted him on the knee, wished him happy birthday again and went back into the house to watch the evening news. Byron stayed with Tom, lying on its back.

As the rain eased into a heavy drizzle. Tom readied himself to leave and walk back to his efficiency when a shiny , new black Toyota Corolla with dark tinted windows pulled up into the Ringer House drive. A young man, probably in his twenties, wearing a navy blue hooded sweat jacket and sunglasses got out of the car. Byron jumped up with a low growl. Tom never saw anyone in Florida — except maybe Canadians just arriving for winter vacation — with skin so white, almost translucent in the gray light. The man stared across the street at Tom.  Suddenly, Byron cowered and slunk behind him. That seemed odd to Tom. He waved to the man who didn’t acknowledge the gesture, turned and went into Ringer House. What’s his problem? And who wears a sweat jacket in Florida, especially in the summer? Oh great, he thought, meth heads live across the street from my parents. Then again, being anti-social isn’t a crime. And it’s not like Tom never saw an albino before.

Monday proved quite busy, busy enough to keep him from thinking about being thirty or hooded young men or what to do next. Tom was finishing up changing tires on a van when Roy, the tire shop owner, called him over the intercom to come to the office. What now? Wet Swamp’s Assistant Police Chief Mike Connors was waiting alone in the small office.

“Tom, I have bad news; please sit down,” Connors said, waiting for Tom to sit. “It’s Mary Ellen. There’s no easy way to say this, but she’s dead. I already talked to her parents.  “I’m sorry.” Mike Connors was five years older than Tom and dated Mary Ellen’s older sister, Sarah, for years. The two couples even double-dated a few times.

Stunned, Tom dropped his head into his hands.

Words cut like glass in his throat.  He managed to sputter out, “Dear God — Dear God — How? — When? — Why?”

“We don’t know anything yet, but we think she may have drowned,” Connors said unemotionally and as professionally as he could. “Two fishermen discovered her body last night floating among the cattails on the north end of the lake.”

“Her body wasn’t bloated, so we think whatever happened, happened yesterday,” Connors said. “We want the Orlando coroner’s report first before we come to any conclusions.

“I have to ask,” he said. “Where were you yesterday?”

Tom looked up. His red teary eyes burned.

Mystery in Wet Swamp” Copyright © 2009, by Road Rage Jewelry®.
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