“No thanks.” Fletcher nodded at the bartender as he gestured at the room. “Seems busy.”
“Yeah, well, it’s Saturday.”
“First time I’ve been to Daversville. Seems like a nice town.”
“It’s a town. Some parts nice. Some parts not so nice if your face don’t fit. Threatening to beat up on the locals for no good reason sure don’t make your face fit.”
The bartender wandered off to polish glasses where he didn’t have to talk to Fletcher. His less than subtle warning wasn’t missed, but neither did it trouble Fletcher as it let him know Tall Boy had tried to spin the standoff as locals being threatened by an outsider. It was a clever move and displayed a low cunning in his adversary.
A waitress was carrying a pitcher of beer towards a table where four women who looked to be in their early twenties were sitting. It wasn’t much of an opportunity, but the general hostility of the bar was annoying Fletcher and if the buying of beers wasn’t going to work, maybe ruffling some feathers would.
“Ma’am, let me get that for you.” Fletcher took the tray from the waitress, deposited it on the table and passed a dead president to the waitress. “It’s on me, ladies. Getting myself all kinds of lonely over there and you girls are far prettier than the bartender.”
Two of the women rolled their eyes and one gave a little sneer, but it was the fourth who gave the reaction he’d been hoping for by snickering at his cheesy comment and returning his smile. He knew that he was neither the handsomest nor the ugliest man to exist, but he also knew that being pleasant, engaging and, most of all, nonthreatening was the best way to instigate a conversation with a woman in a bar.
Fletcher swung a chair round so its back was against the table. No point trapping himself if he had to move in a hurry. For all he was a civilian and had been for a decade, some parts of his Royal Marine training would never leave him. And since arriving in Daversville, he’d been operating on the principle that the more he treated his investigation into Lila’s disappearance as a behind-enemy-lines mission, the more likely he’d be to succeed.
“I’m Grant.” He held out a hand and did his best to memorize their names as they went through the ritual.
It had been too much to hope that one of them would be called Mary-Lou, but it wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that he might just get the kind of lucky he was interested in. Rather than the fast-talking and confident manner of many other southern women he’d met, these ladies were reticent, shy almost, when they drawled their words out.
The two eye-rolling women kept tossing glances to the table which held single men of a similar age, while the sneerer did all she could to pretend to be aloof. Fletcher had been in a thousand bars worldwide, but the story was always the same. Single men and women would drink and then a percentage of them would be open to the possibility of hooking up with someone. Whether it was the first or final steps in attracting someone for the night, or for a lifetime partnership, depended on where they were at that moment in time. After a bad break-up, there may be little desire for romance, but they were still there.
The glances at the single men’s table told Fletcher lots about the eye-rollers. Since he’d invaded their space uninvited they’d been given a choice. Welcome him, or shun him. While they could have easily moved to an empty table or asked him to move on, they hadn’t; instead they’d given him a faux greeting and were now listening to his false tales with an exaggerated zeal, while keeping an eye on the single men. They were using him to make the other guys jealous. It was a test for the men they really fancied. Would they be cool and indifferent, or would they make some kind of move to show the depth of their attraction?
Fletcher saw the setting of jaws and sideways looks at the men’s table and saw a familiar pattern. Three of the four seemed unsettled while the other appeared to be preaching calm. They wouldn’t be happy about the stranger who’d plonked himself at the girls’ table in a poor excuse for an “excuse me” in the middle of their courtship dance. Chairs were fidgeted in and fists clenched and unclenched. Folks from small towns could be very territorial when it came to the town’s opposite sex. Outsiders were viewed as threats to the status quo, and when a new face started drawing attention away from the locals, tempers flared.
Several old Royal Marines buddies of Fletcher’s had regaled him with tales of the villages they’d grown up in as places where most Saturday nights were spent fighting with guys from neighboring villages. Fletcher had grown up in the suburbs so hadn’t experienced the parochial battles. His childhood was all about roaming the edges of the suburbs looking for something more appealing than council-maintained playing fields and the street boasting a half-dozen shops. Until he’d joined the army the day after his sixteenth birthday, his excursions from suburbia had seen him head into the city. Mostly he was looking for girls, but once in a while, he’d feel a more primal itch and would seek out someone else who was looking to pick a fight for no other reason than they too were acting upon ancient instincts.
Life as a soldier had cured Fletcher’s need to hunt violent confrontation. It brought him more than enough and, as he aged, he made the kind of lifelong friendships that so many soldiers make. When you’ve hunkered down beneath strafing machine gunfire with someone, or have put your trust in a person to have your six in a life-or-death situation, you either became friends for life, or one of you didn’t come back.
Another standoff so soon after entering town wasn’t Fletcher’s ambition, but as it felt like a growing possibility, he waved the waitress over and ordered two more pitchers of beer.
With the waitress on her way to the bar, Fletcher rose and crossed to the men’s table. “Guys, there’s a table full of young women over there who keep looking your way while I’m chatting with them. I know when I’m gonna strike out, so why don’t you come join us?”
The invitation had been made, so Fletcher left them to deliberate among themselves and went back to the women.
It took five minutes before the men came over and another four pitchers of beer before they accepted him, but Fletcher got them talking in the end.
One of his key lines of questioning was about the town itself as, regardless of what was online, the locals would give him a clearer picture of life in Daversville than any other source. Daversville was a lumber town and the mill was owned by a family called the Blacketts. Not one of the eight people at the table had a word of criticism for them. They’d eulogized about the Blacketts’ generosity in looking after the elderly, providing a school for the kids and for making sure every one of the townsfolk had a job that suited their individual skills.
When Fletcher left Duke’s to cross Main Street and try the other bar, he was no wiser about the fate of Lila than he was when he’d arrived in Daversville. The youngsters had opened up as alcohol lowered their inhibitions, but they were more interested in coy flirting with each other than answering questions from a guy nearly twenty years their senior.
All eight of the young men and women had taken a look at the picture of Lila, but none had professed any knowledge about her disappearance.
What he had learned, though, was that while they said they knew nothing, there were enough sideways glances and hesitant answers for him to feel they weren’t telling him the whole truth.