Robert and Linda

By H. K. Yeager

High diddle diddle,
The Cat played the Fiddle,
The Cow jump'd over the Moon,
The little Dog laugh'd to see such Craft,
And the Dish ran away with the Spoon.
~Earliest recorded version of the familiar nursery rhyme, printed in London in Mother Goose's Melody around 1765

Love, Death, and Nursery Rhymes

What could be more innocent than a nursery rhyme, or a grade-school, or a small farming community?

Linda Ross's small rural hometown should have been the perfect place for her to settle down and grow past her divorce. It should have been the perfect place for her to enjoy her dog, her music, her pottery, and her job as a grade-school teacher.

But as it turns out, Brenton is no more idyllic than any other town, large or small, and when one of Linda's students goes missing, she finds herself plunged into a tangle of fear and mystery.

Linda's ex-husband isn't the only person stalking her, and even her beloved dog isn't laughing now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: H. K. Yeager
• Release date: Oct 9, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311706539

H. K. Yeager

H. K. Yeager lives in a small town, in an apartment that overlooks a river and a white stone dome.

Book preview

PREFACE

High diddle diddle,

The Cat played the Fiddle,

The Cow jump'd over the Moon,

The little Dog laugh'd to see such Craft,

And the Dish ran away with the Spoon.

~Earliest recorded version of the familiar nursery rhyme, printed in London in Mother Goose's Melody around 1765

Exploring the psychopathology of a failed marriage, looking at some sociobiological influences on a couples’ choices and preferences, and identifying attempts at power and control in their relationship sure sound like story material to me, albeit a tale told tongue-in-cheek. Shall I mention there’s also a death? Ah, love and death – prime ingredients for melodrama!

Yep, I’m absolutely serious about the chapter titles.

The nursery rhyme itself may have been written by some 4th century Saxon inhaling cannabis smoke from a Roman brush fire or perhaps a 1500s’ smee breathing in hashish fumes on a sailing ship. The last two chapter names are my own poke at the unfortunate Sigmund, whose nicotine addiction eventually killed him and who definitely felt some side effects, vis-a-vis others’ problems with it, not from his own use of coke – the snort, not the drink. I didn’t smoke any weed while writing this or ingest anything except fried chicken and iced tea. C’mon, tryptophan and caffeine!

1. High

2. Diddle

3. Diddle

4. The Cat

5. Played

6. The Fiddle

7. The Cow

8. Jump’d

9. Over

10. The Moon

11. The Little Dog

12. Laugh’d

13. To See

14. Such Craft

15. And The Dish Ran Away

16. With The Spoon

17. And Sometimes, Dr. Cigar

18. A Freud Is Just A Freud

High

noun: an excited, euphoric, or stupefied state produced by or as if by a drug

Not too far outside the little town of Brenton’s city limits and situated on the outer road along the south side of the interstate where it was clearly visible to truckers and tourists alike, Mom’s And Pop’s Food And Cheap Gas enjoyed a brisk business. The person who had been posting in the Teens Against Predators chat room under the screen name Buddy – who really wasn’t a sixteen-year-old boy at all, as Buddy had claimed to be, and who really had no intention whatsoever of helping a younger chat member write a social studies report, as Buddy had offered to do – lurked in a corner booth of the café, drinking coffee and watching the front entrance.

Loved by her students, Miz Linda Ross taught fifth grade at Brenton Elementary in her small Midwestern home town, to which she’d returned after filing for her divorce. Her no-nonsense attitude was tempered with compassion for her pupils and she went out of her way to help both the bright and the slow, particularly if a youngster was having difficulties with homework.

Miz Linda Ross held in special regard brilliant young Lem Huffines, eldest of four children whose father drove an eighteen-wheeler for a living and whose mother, overwhelmed by child care tasks and household chores, occasionally sought what she believed to be discreet - though it was common knowledge – relief in reefer. Lem Huffines stopped by Miz Linda Ross’ small house every Saturday to do a few chores in exchange for private tutoring and to pocket the five crisp one-dollar bills she always paid him and enjoy the juice and cookies she provided while chores or schoolwork got done.

Unlike his mother’s open-secret pot smoking, however, besides certain school officials and the boy’s parents, who had formally contracted the tutoring services for which she had refused any compensation other than some chores, not many people knew about these visits; teachers shouldn’t play favorites. Indeed, in class, Miz Linda Ross treated young Lem Huffines just like she did the rest of the kids, maintaining a proper educator's distance even on Saturday afternoons.

Still, the boy sensed she really cared about him.

One cool but sunny October Saturday afternoon Lem Huffines skidded his custom-made red and white bicycle around the northwest corner of Miz Linda Ross’ cottage, throwing up a small cloud of powdered gravel before he leaned his bike against the two wooden porch steps, cleared these with one leap, and knocked on the windowed kitchen door. When Miz Linda Ross looked through the window in her back door, Lem Huffines said, Hey, Miz Linda Ross said, Hey, then waved him into her tidy retro 50s-style kitchen.

Goofus received him enthusiastically as usual, wagging his entire canine body with joy. Amiable mix that he was, the little dog liked nearly everybody, especially this red-capped boy who now stooped to scratch his pale ears and who – ostensibly unknown to his mistress – shortly would slip him part of a cookie.

The small blond cockapoo hadn’t barked when Lem Huffines knocked. Unlike terriers bred to make a great deal of noise, especially when chasing vermin to ground(thereby alerting their keepers as to the whereabouts of said pests) and un-like guard dogs, whose job it is to raise a ruckus over any territorial encroachment, Goofus the cockapoo didn’t bark at anyone. He never even so much as curled his lip at the letter carrier who was, Miz Linda Ross had insisted confidentially to a friend, a complete dork.

Satisfied with his cookie prospects, Goofus plunked his plump, fuzzy canine self down on the black and white tiled floor near the homemade, formica-topped break-fast bar but still moved his stub of a tail back and forth in anticipation of the up-coming treat.

Lem Huffines wiped his sneakers on the turquoise rug just inside the door before perching on a tall, white-painted wooden stool at the breakfast bar. Doffing his red ball cap, he carefully placed it on one blue-jeaned knee like his hardworking father did his billed hat on his own knee when he came home from a run on Sunday afternoons. Dad always sat in the special captain’s chair at the Huffines table while Mom hurried about the kitchen making supper as Mr. Huffines and the boy looked on.

Now he watched Miz Linda Ross open a white metal cabinet over the spotless kitchen counter to get out a turquoise melmac plate for their cookies, a tumbler for his juice, a heavy mug for her own coffee. A lemon squeezer came from another cabinet, three bright oranges (for fresh juice, Miz Linda Ross refused to serve any other kind) from a turquoise melmac bowl on the breakfast bar, a paring knife out of a kitchen drawer, two turquoise duck cloth napkins and a matching turquoise-and-white checked terrycloth tea towel from a second drawer.

If anyone had asked him why he liked to stay in a kitchen while food got fixed, Lem Huffines couldn’t have answered. Maybe he enjoyed studying the sure, swift motions of folks who knew their way around a stove and a fridge, maybe he thought he might learn a thing or two about cooking if he observed closely enough. Nobody ever asked him.

We can talk about your social studies project, Miz Linda Ross suggested, though it actually wasn’t a request, after you wash your hands and while you have your cookies and orange juice.

Yes, ma’am. Lem Huffines obediently got down from his bar stool to perform the required ablutions in a bathroom not much bigger than a large closet situated a few feet from the end of the breakfast bar. He knew that Miz Linda Ross allowed no hand-washing at her kitchen sink when there was a perfectly good lavatory with plenty of soap and towels for that purpose in the nearby tiny cubicle which passed for a bathroom.

The kitchen felt cozy this afternoon despite its cool color scheme of black and white with turquoise accents. Golden light slanted through white lace curtains, drawn to either side of the white-painted wood frame of the window above the chrome faucet, to sprinkle pale yellow and gray specks across the sink and onto the front of an ancient, white refrigerator nearby. Streaming through similar lace curtains similarly parted at a similar window set into the kitchen door (the door itself had been painted white like the window trim and the oak frame of the breakfast bar,) sunshine patterned the spotless black and white floor tiles, too. Even though the sunbeams didn’t quite reach that far, they still seemed to warm the breakfast bar, a sturdy affair of four strong white-painted oak pillars supporting a five-foot-long, three-foot broad, white formica top in a heavy frame, the frame also having been painted white to match the posts.

The breakfast bar had been a project conceived and constructed by a previous occupant, with the landlord’s approval, assumed Miz Linda Ross, and she had camouflaged a neat array of kitchen items on handy shelving below the bar’s white formica top by thumb-tacking to the smooth wooden edge of the frame some white lace panels like those at the window above the sink and at the window of her white kitchen door. Lem Huffines knew his teacher stored Goofus’s dishes and a covered pickle crock filled with premium dog food on the shelves underneath the bar, along with a heavy, round flowerpot containing leftover potting soil from her indoor gardening projects, a two-slice electric toaster, and a crate of grocery-store-special canned goods and other supplies. So he was careful not to let his foot slip and knock anything over as he had done last week. Miz Linda Ross had seemed unfazed by that minor mishap but Lem Huffines had been mortified in his scramble to retrieve cans of creamed corn and jars of pickled beets.

Except for the turquoise plastic bowl of oranges, the only item on the formica-topped breakfast bar was a turquoise-glazed ceramic cookie jar, handcrafted testament to Miz Linda Ross’s considerable pottery-making talents, a skill which she had not pursued lately since she had been unable to bring her kiln with her when she had moved back to her home town of Brenton. For all she knew, her ex-husband Robert Ross had sold it.

Other than white metal doors hiding the white metal cabinetry above the kitchen counter, two black plastic-coated hooks adjacent to the back door (upon one of which Miz Linda Ross had hung her jacket while a spare house key dangled from the other,) and the obligatory black cat clock with sideways-moving eyes and a pendulum tail, nothing broke the expanse of the kitchen’s white walls, either.

Uncluttered also were the kitchen counters. In addition to a coffee maker placed near the sink, all that topped the white formica counter were a black cordless phone resting neatly in its dock and a small computer tower nearby, with her keyboard, mouse and monitor sitting between the tower and the telephone. Everything else remained neatly hidden away in the white metal cabinets above and below the white formica countertop and in the kitchen drawers and under the white formica-covered breakfast bar. Miz Linda Ross obviously believed in keeping her food preparation areas and dining spaces clear; even her small herb garden thrived in small white handmade ceramic pots on the window sill above the sink instead of on the cooler white-topped counter.

To Lem Huffines’ right was the small bathroom where he just had washed his hands. Also painted white to match the rest of the woodwork and sporting an old-fashioned white porcelain knob, the bathroom door opened into the facility, not away from it towards the kitchen, as a logical design would have required. The cubicle was so tiny he had needed to step to the far side of the well-scrubbed but rust-stained toilet before he could shut the door.

Although a boy his age might not have noticed other details, on his first visit to Miz Linda Ross’ cottage Lem Huffines had seen that, in addition to the porcelain lavatory and a chrome-plated soap dish fastened to the cool, gray linoleum-covered wall above it, the half-bath boasted a miniature yellow plastic basket below the tiny sink for soiled linens and a diminutive yellow plastic waste can beside this. An even smaller yellow basket near the commode offered two pale yellow rolls of heavenly softness for personal hygiene while clean towels and washcloths in various shades of warm yellow lay folded atop the toilet tank lid. A deep yellow hand towel graced a black, plastic-coated metal coat hook, like the two on the kitchen wall, screwed into the inside of the white-painted wooden bathroom door. Lem Huffines had put in the small yellow laundry basket under the lavatory the lemon-colored towel he had used to dry his hands before carefully draping that fresh, darker yellow towel over the hook.

Behind him where he sat at the breakfast bar once again, but still to his right, an archway led into an informal parlor and the little cottage’s main entrance.

Outside, a few paces from the front steps, a screened porch had been added to the house, blocking the only bedroom window. Looking at the cottage from the front, none could have guessed Miz Linda Ross’s boudoir lay beyond the attached porch and wasn’t even really connected to the porch itself except by the single bedroom window. When friends had remarked on this, Miz Linda Ross had explained that the landlord charged such low rent she was willing to live with the odd results of a previous tenant’s do-it-yourself home improvements.

The boy knew nothing of home design or construction or house additions, though, as he sat and watched his teacher pour fresh orange juice into a tumbler for him and fill her mug with coffee for herself before she placed the small plate of snicker doodles on the formica-topped breakfast bar, handed him his turquoise-and-white checked napkin, and sat down opposite him.

His mistress putting out cookies and settling herself on the white stool across from her young guest signaled Goofus to go into his Starving Dog routine by rolling onto his back and sticking his fuzzy paws in the air while he let his tongue loll as if he were faint from hunger.

Lem Huffines grinned and pretended not to sneak him a tidbit, Miz Linda Ross smiled and pretended not to see.

Goofus crunched contentedly as the boy and his teacher discussed his social studies report about youth safety from internet predators. When she cautioned him not to test his online methods himself, however, he mumbled a polite, Yes, Miz Ross, but ducked his head. She decided not to pursue the subject. Surely he understood the reasons to exercise caution in such matters? So there was no need to press the issue, was there?

After about an hour, swallowing the next-to-last bite of the last cookie, downing the rest of his orange juice, and thrilling Goofus by slipping Miz Linda Ross’s fuzzy housemate the final nibble of snicker doodle, Lem Huffines patted the little dog farewell and thanked his teacher for her help and hospitality before taking his leave.

Miz Linda Ross followed her young protégé to the back steps to wave goodbye as he donned his red ball cap and hopped on his custom-built red and white bike to ride away towards the east with Goofus trailing him.

It wouldn’t be until much later that Miz Linda Ross would realize that Lem Huffines had headed in a direction opposite his home, which was located on the west side of town, not on the east.

At the time, however, she didn’t pay any heed to his going the wrong way.

Nor was she particularly worried that Goofus had followed the boy. The little cockapoo was street-wise and Brenton was a small town anyway, with little traffic and without leash laws. She assumed, therefore, that Goofus would be back at her cottage safely within the hour after escorting his cookie-sharing friend part of the way as he usually did.

Still, she felt unsettled