Adding to last night's post. There's the train station and main street. The houses on the side streets are fantastically beautiful, iron porch railings, storm cellars, the works. The next stop up from Mendota, heading west into the black. Driving around, looking at the energy turbines on the farmland, Trey Barker told me of recent death as well as one that goes way back. Back in the late 70s, a teenage girl disappeared, her skeleton was found about six months later in a wooded area. The morning the girl went missing--we are talking daylight here, not 3 AM morning--a woman passed a purse on the road and stopped to take it, but it was streaked with fresh blood. She continued on her way, to a beauty salon, but on the way home she saw that the purse was gone from the road. (Here's the part that makes me want to stand outside this woman's house and scream my fucking head off; she still lives in Princeton). She calls the police, to complain about the purse being rightfully hers since she saw it first. Never mind the cops didn't have it. The consensus is that the killer went back and retrieved it. The woman admitted she saw fresh blood but thought it was nail-polish. Princeton is near I-80 and in the serial killer database there is indeed a listing for an "I-80 Killer," but about the only notes in the folder show that he is a trucker. Pretty slim folder. The purse never showed up, and I wonder if the idiot woman even remembers what the hell happened and how badly she fucked up.
The other story occurred in Bureau County, but one town north. A guy running for public office had a local reporter checking into his finances and things. No nefariousness there, just trying to write a decent investigative story that might get picked up by AP. Melodramas occur, and I'll skip to the end. The fellow running for office shows up at this woman's home, she's in her late 50s, and shows her printouts of child porn and a concocted story about how the photos could be traced to her husband's computer. The guy was wearing gloves, I guess to not have fingerprints on the pages. This is important to know. He tells the woman his intent to mail these to the sheriff or a news station--her husband was a respected man in the town--and she has a heart attack. The jagoff waits fifteen minutes to call the cops, the EMTs later said that if they had arrived earlier, the woman would have lived. The man's excuse for waiting to call was that he fretted over having a hole in his glove. There was never any trial, he denied his plan to smear the dead woman's husband. I write stories about a serial killer called Every Mother's Son, he only kills bastards like the two people I've just described. I killed off the purse lady in a story called "From A Sow's Ear." That was the story I thought I could post last night, but then couldn't find it readily. There are six stories with Jimmy Dvorak, E.M.S. The name comes from the band who sang "C'mon Down To My Boat, Baby" in the 60s. I don't think I could carry a novel with the guy, but maybe one day his memoirs will come out. The first story was published in 1990, so he is getting up there in age...
As John Mellencamp says, Ain't that America?
