Page 13 of Go Alone

What she knew of him was a quiet, kindly older man who kept to himself but didn’t hide away, someone who would shovel snow off a neighbor’s driveway and volunteer every Thanksgiving at the Wooster soup kitchen. A salt-of-the-Earth sort, like most everyone around here. What she saw on her computer screen didn’t mesh with that image.

“Honey?”

Anita called back without looking. After twenty-three years with James, nineteen of them married, she was no longer startled by the sound of his voice, even when it interrupted her thoughts. “Yeah?”

“You coming to bed?”

The ghost of a smile crossed Anita’s lips at the poorly hidden hopeful tone in James’s voice. Now that they were on the wrong side of forty, the two of them didn’t have the same drive they did when they were younger, but it felt nice to know that James still wanted her.

She'd never been a looker, a fact her stern, loving mother never spared her from, but James wanted her all the same, and ever since she agreed to have ice cream with him at the Great Lakes Creamery on the campus of Ohio State University, he'd never wanted another. Nor had she.

“Not yet,” she replied. “Got work to do.”

James approached Anita’s desk, set up in the den since their bedroom was uncharacteristically small for a farmhouse. If he felt disappointment at the dashing of his amorous plans, he didn’t show it. “Howard?”

She nodded.

“Got anything?”

That time, she turned to look at him. “You know I can’t tell you that, honey.”

He smiled, the down-home country-boy smile that had swept her off her feet at eighteen and kept her swept ever since. He lifted his strong hands to his shoulders and said, “Any progress, though?”

“Might be,” she replied.

“Not a Local, is it?”

He said it like that too, with the first L capitalized.

“No, probably not a Local,” Anita replied. She could say that much, at least. “Could be, but probably not.”

Satisfied, James nodded and bent to kiss his wife’s cheek. In the Land of Ten Thousand Sayings, probably not was the same as definitely not. “I’ll be up a little longer if you come to bed soon.”

There was that hope again. Anita chuckled and offered another Midwestern gem. “Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise.”

“Might be nice if it rose a little bit,” James opined, stairs creaking under his weight as he climbed them. “Bud Hollister might not want to call this a drought, but he don’t got six hundred acres of green beans to water.”

“Snow was good this season,” Anita called back. “We’ll have groundwater.”

“Yep,” James acknowledged.

Anita crossed her arms and returned to the problem of Howard Greer.

Leonard Odum, a Local nearly as tenured as James, was clean as a new whistle. He’d lived in the house next to Howard for the past eleven years, but for the rest of his life before that, he’d lived a quarter mile down the road in an old log cabin that survived one hundred twenty years of rain, sun, snow, and sleet before finally succumbing to a tornado that had thankfully chosen to strike when Leonard was out of town.

He was a deacon at United Methodist of Wooster, the congregation Anita would have attended had she not traded her faith in God for the rationality of experience. He organized an annual clothing drive for the county’s poor, not many and not as bad off as other places but still left dreading the cold snap each year. He greeted Howard Greer with a fresh-baked apple pie the day Howard moved in, even though he didn’t yet live next door to him, an event not recounted in any official file, but one Anita had heard through the Grapevine, that all-knowing conveyor of Midwestern knowledge.

The Grapevine, it seemed, wasn’t all-knowing. It did not, for example, know that Howard Greer had on three separate occasions as zoning commissioner for the City of Columbus, rezoned private property for commercial development. Because of this, it wasn’t aware of the results of those actions, namely that three homeowners had been unceremoniously forced from their homes on the pretense of zoning violations that hadn’t existed until Greer decided they existed.

It didn’t realize that in all three cases, Howard had benefited financially, in one case, receiving kickbacks that flirted with seven figures, these from a clothing wholesaler that absorbed the Sutter property.

That was the first rezoning decision, made fifteen years ago. The second came three years later when Howard eliminated Barbara Finch’s right to own her home and the property yielded to a building inspection service whose owners listed Howard as a non-voting shareholder.

The third, eight years after the second, was harder to figure out. It listed the owner as Linus Varne and the property as being in “outlying areas.”

Yeah, that was horseshit. Official government documents didn’t vaguely armwave to “outlying areas”. Someone had altered this file, possibly Howard himself, to hide that property disruption entirely. It was no coincidence that Howard had retired less than five months after approving that rezoning.

Anita looked up Linus Varne. The search result came back with a dozen people who lived just about everywhere in Ohio, but not in the Columbus or Wayne County areas. She expanded it to a nationwide search and got two hundred twenty-one results. When she added Columbus to the search bar, she received nine of the twelve previous results, all of whom lived in Cincinnati.