Page 4 of They Say a Girl Died Here

She turned the music up loud enough to hurt her ears and drown out any attempt at thinking her mind might do and closed her eyes, her headache finally gone.

5

It was around a thirty-minute easy walk into town, but as the sun grew hotter and the cheap fabric of Anna’s uniform began to cling to her skin, sweat curling the loose hair at the base of her dark ponytail, she wished Grandma had lent her some of her nest egg to buy a car instead of telling her how good walking was for the soul.

Maybe the walking thing was true, but not in this heat when Anna had an eight-hour shift coming up. All Grandma ever cared about was the soul—how to be your best person for the next life, as if this one didn’t warrant a little attention too.

Harper’s Creek was Grandma’s hometown and she claimed to have had a happy childhood here, but as Anna walked the length of Main Street to get to Jeannie’s Diner, she reached the same conclusion she had every time. The place was a dump. After growing up in Boston and then having her year at Columbia in New York, this rural town was alien. There were some crops in the distance, but the majority of the fields she passed were hardly lush and full as they should be at this time of year. She knew from what she’d heard in the diner that more and more farmers were weighed down with debts and no chance of paying them off because even when they’d had good years, they didn’t make enough, and then the drought returned. She didn’t understand why they didn’t all cut their losses and move somewhere with jobs. And hope.

At the edge of town she passed the first couple of too many closed stores with faded For Lease signs in their windows. The first was a boutique, Rags to Riches, and the other, Party Time!, had grime coating the inside windowsills where a mannequin in a cheap nurse’s outfit leaned heavily to one side, staring out, woefully forgotten. The quiet sidewalks were cracked and uneven, dry dirt filling the gaps. America’s breadbasket now a dust bowl. Struggling to stay alive but dying all the same. The noise and wealth of the city—the constant energy of it—was a different universe. The quiet was the only thing she liked about it here. It made her feel almost safe. Out of time.

On Main, she passed the small supermarket and the hardware store and heard the strains of a hymn. A congregation in full voice filled the air even though the church doors were closed and it was a Saturday.

You teach us through the growing grain, the price of life eternal, plain

No paradise built by idle hands, no love without some pain

Where fear has scarred the land, let his word be our decree

We shall be called to bleed ourselves, that others might be free.

She tried to zone out the singing. There wasn’t much evidence of grain growing in this small town. Still, the voices inside swelled, a wave of sound in the quiet. A farmers’ service, that’s what the board said was happening inside. Maybe prayer was all they had left.

6

There were three social hubs in town: the church, The Shamrock—a bar that had no visible links to Ireland, so far as Anna could tell—and Jeannie’s Diner. Of the three, Jeannie’s was the most consistently busy. The pay was shit and the hours erratic, but at least the job didn’t involve getting a bus into Kearney, which would add an hour each way, and the time drifted by quickly enough with a steady stream of customers to serve.

Jeannie and her husband, Miles, had opened the place thirty years before when they were young—as framed photographs on the walls attested—and while Miles, who spent his time in the kitchen or doing the books, had happily spread to fat and gone bald, Jeannie’s hair was the same harsh red as back then, and she kept it in the same fifties style that had been retro in the nineties, let alone now.

Her figure was trim and her lipstick still a crimson that didn’t suit her hair, but Anna doubted anyone had ever been brave enough to tell her. Jeannie was a bless your heart kind of woman. Sugar on the surface but sour and salt underneath, every compliment wrapped in a barb.

“Jeannie.” A well-dressed ruddy-faced man who’d been eating with his family came to the counter from their booth. “I’ll settle up.” He nodded over to the corner. “And give me the Millers’ check too.”

Anna knew the Millers were the foursome in the far corner where the parents had the smallest items on the menu so their kids could have burgers and fries. She’d worked here three Saturdays so far and they’d come in on each one, the event maybe a family treat that the parents didn’t want to give up.

“That’s very kind of you, William McArthur.” Jeannie’s painted fingernails flew across the keys of the old register, ringing up the items and getting his change.

“They’re hardworking folks. Won’t find a better farmer in the state. Their luck will turn soon.”

“I’ll be praying for it.” Jeannie nodded her head sagely.

“Amen to that.” McArthur slapped his large hand down on the counter hard, as if making a judgment, before picking up his hat and tipping it at the waitresses, and ushering his wife and children out.

“Take some ice cream sundaes over to those kids, will you, Suzy?” Miles said through the hatch. “Oh hell, for the parents too.”

“Really?” Jeannie turned to face her husband. One of her thin penciled-in brows rose to a sharp arch. “No wonder we’ll never retire rich, Miles Brannigan.”

“You’re a real pushover, Uncle Miles.” Suzy leaned through the hatch and kissed him on the cheek before starting at the ice cream station. Suzy, dressed in the same Jeannie’s uniform as Anna, albeit one that stopped mid-thigh, was around the same age as Anna but Anna wasn’t sure she liked her much. She was pretty, and her short uniform clung in all the right places, but like her aunt Jeannie, sometimes there was a streak of meanness under her soft exterior.

“Their farm struggling?” Anna asked Miles, watching the Mil-lers’ surprise and relief at their check being paid. “Nice that people are looking out for them.”

Miles snorted. “Some fancy city company out of Omaha is buying up a lot of the land around here. All across the state. If the bank forecloses on that farm, we have no control who they sell to. Better to keep the Millers afloat ourselves than get eaten up by soulless corporations that don’t understand us.”

“Mormons are buying land too. I saw a crazy documentary about them on Netflix.” Suzy squirted cream high on top of the sundaes before adding cherries and sprinkles. “One woman had fifty brothers, turned out. And they were all killing each other to take charge. Blood atonement, they called it. Like these people had to be sacrificed to God or whatever for their sins. They caught them, though. Locked them up, and the women, who hadn’t been allowed to do anything but marry old men and have children, ran away. Don’t want that craziness here either.”

“Something tells me that’s not all Mormons, Suzy.” Miles looked at her, amused, and she shrugged, taking the tray of desserts.

“Better safe than sorry.”