Mad River

elementary school with everyone who knew Welsh and Sharp. If they’re running, I need to know which way they’re going.”
    “Good luck with that,” Davenport said. “I’ll get things going here. Stay in touch.”
    •   •   •
    VIRGIL DOWNLOADED Jimmy Sharp’s and Becky Welsh’s driver’s license photos to his cell phone, and spent a few minutes looking at them. Jimmy was a kid who a lot of people would have said was handsome—he had the cheekbones and the squared-off chin, but there was something about the cast of his features that wasn’t quite right: he looked sneaky. Becky should have been pretty: blond, small nose, big eyes, but there was a disappointment about her face—a disappointment with life—that made her look sad, and a little too hard.
    But then, he thought, maybe makeup could fix it.
    •   •   •
    THE GATHERING AT Gerald Ford Elementary School brought in about thirty townspeople, who were sitting on metal folding chairs, talking quietly among themselves, when Virgil arrived. Virgil had told Duke about the silver pickup, and Duke had called back to his office and had an alert broadcast through the local sheriffs’ association, which covered eight counties in the western part of the state.
    Virgil was wearing the black sport coat and collared shirt he’d worn to church, which passed for fairly sober wear in a country town. He smiled at the crowd when he came in, with Duke trailing behind, and picked up a folded chair, shook it open, and planted it in front of the group.
    He introduced himself, and Duke, and said, “Y’all may have heard what’s going on, here. We’re trying to find Jimmy Sharp and Becky Welsh. I can tell you that Mr. and Mrs. Welsh and the senior Mr. Sharp were all found shot to death. We haven’t been able to find Jimmy or Becky. We don’t know whether they were involved in the shootings, or if they might be victims, or maybe they don’t even know about them. Anyway, we need to find them, and since you all know one of them, or both of them, we were hoping you could throw out some ideas about where they might be, or might be going, or who we might contact to find that out.”
    A square-faced man with straw-colored hair raised a hand and asked, “Isn’t it a little . . . abnormal . . . to be talking to everybody at once like this?”
    Virgil said, “This is an abnormal situation. We were hoping that if you folks listen to each other, and mix it up a little, we’ll spark off some ideas. We’re brainstorming.”
    A woman off to one side muttered, “I don’t know nothing about this.”
    Virgil said, “Look, what kind of a kid was Jim? When you knew him? Who knew him best?”
    Everyone looked around, and eventually most of them focused on a young man who stirred nervously and then said, “We used to hang out, some. Not like we were good friends.”
    Virgil: “Was he a good kid, bad kid, middle-of-the-road?”
    The young man said, “He was . . . okay . . . most of the time.”
    Somebody snorted, then an older man said, “Oh, horseshit.”
    That got them going.
    •   •   •
    JIMMY SHARP was a thin young man of average height, with long black hair and what one man said was “a joker’s face, like the joker on a playing card.” That seemed mostly to mean Sharp’s smile, which often formed itself into a sneer, usually with a cigarette hanging from his bottom lip.
    A man named Ralph, who identified himself as one of Sharp’s teachers through sixth grade, said that he’d begun bullying other children in third or fourth grade, after he’d been held back the first time. “He was one of those kids who just started getting his hormones early, and probably got whacked around by his father, and he never got along with books, and that all turned him into a little punk. His mother, whose name was Jolene, if I’m not mistaken, took off from here about that time, and hasn’t been back, as far as I know.”
    The crowd agreed that she hadn’t been back, and that she was an O’Hara, and the whole family was gone now since Bernice died. None of them had ever come back, and Jimmy had no other relatives around.
    “He used to hang out at the Surprise. Butch thinks he was stealing from there, but never caught him. He wasn’t smart in school, but he could be clever when he wanted to be,” Harvey said.
    “What’d he steal?” Duke asked.
    “Ask Butch.”
    “I hate to accuse somebody,” said an old man in an old blue suit,