His first order of business was a call to Wendy. He wanted to let her know he’d arrived and that he was getting on with finding out what had happened to Lila. Wendy had been keen for him to find her childhood friend and former sitter, and knowing her, she’d want an update.
With no signal available for his cell, Fletcher had to use the payphone in the lobby. The call lasted a good ten minutes and when he signed off by telling her he loved her, he could hear the affection in her voice as she returned his words.
The bartender who’d gotten Fletcher his room key had been pleasant enough until he’d mentioned he was in town looking for a friend. After that his conversation had been stilted to the point it was forced.
His eyes had held the same look that had been in the server’s at the diner when Fletcher had flashed her the picture of Brad and Lila.
When he thought about it, he couldn’t help but wonder what the locals made of the disappearances. Before coming to Daversville, he’d scoured the internet and had learned that Lila’s disappearance hadn’t even been covered in the local newspaper.
Fletcher didn’t know circulation figures, but he knew rural towns that were too small to have their own TV news program often still had newspapers. Without a city’s worth of news to go online, the papers would focus on all the same news items a national paper did, just on a smaller scale. The president might not get a mention, but the local mayor would have his picture on at least four pages per edition.
For something as newsworthy as a tourist’s disappearance not to have been reported was odd. While there was no doubt small-town journalism had a different focus than state or national, it was still unlikely to have been glossed over. Especially as Fletcher knew Don and his wife had offered a reward for information that would help them find their daughter. Though they’d paid for an ad in the paper which covered Daversville, it did seem their appeal hadn’t been posted on the online version of the paper.
Come Monday, he planned to visit the library in the nearby town of Douglas, to look through a few back copies to make sure the ad had run in the print version.
Fletcher made his way into the bar and took a look around. What he saw didn’t fill him with confidence that he’d get the answers he wanted.
Chapter Six
Duke’s was what you’d expect of a small town bar on a Saturday night. Some tables had people tucking into meals and others had groups of men or women surrounding a pitcher of beer. There was a thrum of conversation interspersed with the odd laugh or loud exclamation. The patrons were having a good time and that was fine.
What wasn’t fine were the sidelong looks he was getting from them all. As he crossed the room to get to the bar counter, nobody met Fletcher’s eyes or returned the nods and smiles he cast their way.
He got that rural life was rife with insular behavior. It was almost as if they were protecting themselves from the interference of outsiders. However, he’d been in a lot of towns small and large, and he knew there was always someone who broke rank and returned a pleasantry that was passed without agenda.
Fletcher was aware that enough time had passed for word of his earlier standoff to have spread throughout the town. He supposed he might be getting ostracized for standing up to the wrong person, or maybe the locals had decided en masse that he was the kind of bad news that was best avoided. He got why they were shunning him. He was a stranger who’d be here today, gone tomorrow. If word got back to Tall Boy and whomever was pulling his strings that they drank and chatted with the guy who’d made a fool of him, they might find themselves facing off against Tall Boy and his cronies next. Either way, his plan to ingratiate himself with the locals by buying a few rounds wasn’t looking like such an easy option.
While he waited for the beer he’d ordered, Fletcher took a slow look around the bar and assessed the room as well as the patrons. He kept a friendly look on his face as he took in the bare floorboards and the paneled walls. The beams supporting the floor above were exposed just in case there wasn’t enough wood on show. In a lumber-rich area, it made sense that wood had been used wherever possible over other materials, it was just that the amount used was sufficient to create a sensory overload.
The bar counter was a single piece of oak whose edge retained the original contours of the tree’s exterior. Polished to a high degree it gleamed beneath the paper coasters. A knot in the oak had the look of a wolf about it and when he squinted its way he saw the animal’s head take a more realistic form. Fletcher guessed it would serve as a good barometer of drunkenness. When you saw the wolf without squinting, it’d be time to stop drinking.
As for the bar’s patrons, they were a different case altogether. Fletcher tried to assess them without being judgmental. He put aside their lack of reciprocal manners to give them the benefit of the doubt, but there was no escaping the harsh truth: Daversville was a town that time hadn’t ever known about, let alone forgot. The clothes worn by the townspeople weren’t so much outdated fashion as never having been fashionable. Each item was clean and well presented, but they were clearly worn as an alternative to nudity rather than to make the wearer feel or look good. The men wore jeans and nondescript shirts, sometimes with a vest, while the women were dressed in flowery dresses that mostly covered the ankle and buttoned right up to the chin. None of the women wore cosmetics or jewelry beyond a smear of lipstick or a wedding ring so far as he could see, and their hairstyles were functional rather than fashionable. Most of the men had bushy beards that scraggled down onto their chests. Human nature normally drove people to want to look better than their peers. Whether it was a question of self-worth or for the attraction of a mate, an effort to rise above the pack would be made. Clothes and hairstyles along with cosmetics and jewelry were the foundation stones of this extra effort, and yet, none of the townspeople he’d met or seen had gone down this route in any meaningful fashion. The tables hosting the obvious singletons were surrounded by the same unimaginative styles.
Fletcher knew that a high percentage of Georgians were deeply religious, yet Daversville seemed to be only one step closer to modernization than an Amish settlement. While it was perfectly acceptable to have religious beliefs, it was unusual for an entire town in these parts to forsake modern trends. In any other part of the country, half the people in the room would be fiddling with a cell phone. As he looked around, he didn’t see a single person with a cell phone, let alone obsessed by it. His own daughter was more likely to win Mr. Universe than she was to spend more than five minutes without her cell in her hand. While he wasn’t keen on a lot of what he’d seen in Daversville, Fletcher could get on board with a world that didn’t include cell phones. Whether it was the complete lack of signal in the town or some other reason, he felt it was refreshing to see people actually conversing with those around them instead of someone who might be thousands of miles away.
It may well be the other bar across the street was filled with the people wearing the latest fashions and dancing to the beat of whatever sound was currently popular—Fletcher had little time for modern music and often cringed in horror at the stuff his daughter played. However, the likelihood of that being true wasn’t enough to have Fletcher bet more than a nickel.
“You looking for something to eat?”