Nashville: The Mood (Part 11)

By Donald H. Carpenter

Is Nashville simply Music City? The capital of Tennessee? A state of mind? A sea of corruption? A world of happiness, ordinariness, hypocrisy, vicious gossip, and political skullduggery? Where politics, religion, sex, academics, and crime cross paths in such a way as to be almost indistinguishable? Enter a world of uninspiring public officials, soulful prostitutes, scheming professional classes, and tormented preachers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Donald H. Carpenter
• Release date: Apr 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215482414

Donald H. Carpenter

Donald H. Carpenter is a former certified public accountant who is the author of six books: Dueling Voices, I Lost It At The Beginning, 101 Reasons NOT to Murder the Entire Saudi Royal Family, He Knew Where He Was Going (?), Man of a Million Fragments: The True Story of Clay Shaw, and LANNY. He is currently working on a fictional series about Nashville.

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NASHVILLE: THE MOOD

PART 11

by Donald H. Carpenter

Copyright ©2023 by Donald H. Carpenter

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All rights reserved. This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

Cover design by Charles Hooper

Printed in the United States of America

NASHVILLE: THE MOOD

PART 11

Todd Willinger was well known in a small circle on the western side of Nashville. He had served in the Army for approximately eight years, serving two tours of duty in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. Toward the end of his Army service, he was stationed at Fort Campbell near Clarksville, Tennessee, approximately sixty miles to the northwest of Nashville. After exiting the Army, he had made his way to Nashville and had found employment in a variety of occupations. He had driven delivery trucks for several companies, but over time he had combined the mechanical training he had initially learned in the Army with some further education in that regard, and had begun working for an auto repair shop not far from Vanderbilt University. In addition to his mechanical work, he had learned about installation of custom car stereo equipment, and had been instrumental in helping the shop to generate new revenue. His boss had come to regard him very highly.

Willinger never seemed to have a steady girlfriend, but he was often seen in the company of a female. His friends and coworkers often saw him conversing with one female or another—meeting briefly with one at the shop, sometimes exchanging small items of personal property—but it was never clear what his off-work relationships were. At social encounters, he almost always brought along a date, but it was rare to see the same woman twice. Those who knew him were naturally curious about it, but Willinger always seemed to be able to deflect such questions with vague answers. On some occasions, he may have said that he simply hadn’t found anyone who was interested in a long-term relationship with him. At other times, he commented on the flakiness of some of the women he had met. Whatever his reasons, the pattern people had noticed early on about him continued through the years, such that even those who had known him from the time he first arrived in Nashville could not remember a relationship that had lasted more than a few weeks. Some women appeared, disappeared for a while, reappeared for short periods, then disappeared again permanently. It was a curious phenomenon, everyone agreed, but by now it had gone on for so long that no one expected anything else.

Willinger had been in Nashville a little over seven years. One social event he had attended semi-regularly was a card-playing and TV-watching gathering held by two employees of an automobile parts wholesaler located in the city. The gathering was very informal, held at the home of one of the two individuals, and was usually well attended. By general custom, the socials often began in the late afternoon of a work day and continued well into the night. Some arrived early, some left late, some were there the entire time. Willinger usually arrived on the late side, after at least a majority of the participants had arrived, and he usually departed in the early hours of the evening, long before the parties broke up.

On this particular late afternoon, a sunny day in early May, he stuck with that pattern. The weather was excellent, with clear skies, moderate temperatures, and a slight breeze. As he had on many such occasions, Willinger arrived with a date. There was nothing unusual about that, but his date this time caught the eye of nearly every participant there. It was more of a stag party by nature, and most guys never brought a date, and those who were married rarely brought their wives. But there were some who did, and Willinger usually did.

His date this time was a tall brunette, slender but somewhat buxom, with a dark tight-fitting outfit with a short skirt. Everyone who saw the woman when she entered perked up immediately, and those who hadn’t noticed her soon felt the buzz in the room and were quick to follow. She had a serious demeanor, and only cracked a brief smile when Willinger introduced her to the first few people to come up to them.

Willinger, by contrast, was his usual modest-looking self. His dates had often drawn at least mild attention, and he often acted embarrassed by the fact that he usually had a woman accompanying him, when many of the invitees didn’t. It was as if he should have known that his companion would draw comments, but instead he was taken aback by it all. It was the normal course during an evening that his date would tend to mingle separately with some of the other guests, while Willinger would watch television, play cards, or simply stand around and talk; the two didn’t spend much time hanging out together, and few words passed between them.

On this occasion, there were only two other women present. One was the wife of the man who hosted the party; she often missed the gatherings because she had a traveling job. The other was a new girlfriend of one of Willinger’s coworkers at the repair shop; she seemed somewhat shy and said very little the whole evening. The host’s wife, when introduced to Willinger’s date, offered a look of somewhat bewildered amusement, and shot a quick glance at Willinger, with a bare hint of a smile. But she didn’t say anything, simply nodded to the woman and went back to setting out snacks on a table off to one side of the living room.

Willinger’s dates usually attracted a crowd of sorts, simply because there were so few women at the gatherings, and many of the guys were anxious to make conversation. But this one in particular drew a crowd perhaps larger than ever before, and although Willinger was standing across the room most of the evening, he could tell that many of the men around her found her quite fascinating. Some of them seemed to adopt an attitude of being overly friendly, or at least they would have been considered so on most occasions. They would lean over and hold their head close to hers, as if they were trying to listen closely to her above the din of the gathering, and they often would place their hand on her bare arm or shoulder for brief periods of time, withdrawing quickly as if they had been burned. Willinger noticed this also, but he gave no indication that he minded it.

It was several hours into the evening when a commotion broke out in the room. Willinger heard raised voices, and immediately looked toward the area where his girlfriend was standing. Several guys were behaving in a somewhat animated fashion, raising their voices, pointing fingers, and otherwise gesturing rather wildly. Quickly, several others rushed to the area to find out what was going on, and Willinger made his way there as well, standing behind a couple of rows of onlookers.

It emerged that someone had made the accusation that Willinger’s girlfriend of the evening was actually a male. Apparently, as facts emerged later, it had begun as sort of a whisper, a theory at most, and during the course of time, and following the consumption of significant amounts of alcohol, the theory had been accepted by at least several individuals. Some of those individuals had become angry at the situation, although the anger emerged at varying levels; others were simply amused by the theory. It was fair to say that no one really knew for certain, because the woman certainly wasn’t admitting anything, but once the theory had formed it did not go quickly into the night.

The woman’s method of dealing with the accusations was to neither confirm nor deny it, but rather to express an unusually mild sense of surprise, combined with an equally mild hint of indignation, and in so doing help to defuse the situation at its most heated. Eyes soon turned to Willinger, but his demeanor was as sheepish as always, and he neither admitted nor denied anything, either.

Willinger and his date disappeared from the gathering soon thereafter, after the host and his wife, and several other guests, had soothed everything over as best they could. The tension in the room seemed to diminish, and for the most part things got back to where they had been. Sometime after that, everyone seemed to notice that Willinger and his friend had gone, although few could remember them actually leaving.

It was an odd occurrence, the incident at the gathering, certainly one that those who attended could and did talk about for some time. With the varying political and cultural views of the guests at the party, it was no surprise that for some the topic lingered in importance for longer or shorter periods of time. For some, it was simply an amusing story, while others were quietly or openly outraged, and remembered it in a bitter way.

But the whole thing would have died out eventually if something hadn’t happened immediately thereafter. The next morning, a work day, Willinger failed to show up at work. His boss wasn’t alarmed immediately; Willinger was occasionally late, and always stayed late to make up for the lost time. However, by the end of the morning, the boss was getting concerned. He had been unable to reach Willinger on any of the telephone numbers he had, even two that he had for members of Willinger’s family in other states. The boss, trying to avoid a sense of panic, assured those family members that he would send an employee out to check up on him, and that it was probably nothing, anyway.

There were no sensational stories going on in Nashville at the time—no political scandals, no competing crime stories, no tornado damage. In that vacuum, the story began to get around, pick up steam, such that within a few weeks television stations, and the only major daily newspaper, began to cover it, if cautiously.

In the stories, the disappearance was noted, but it was framed more as a simple disappearance than a crime, since police had not called it a crime. Willinger was simply gone, no one knew why or where, and as far as facts were concerned that was all there was to it. Soon, an enterprising reporter for the city’s alternative newspaper began to look a little more deeply into Willinger’s background and private life, interviewing members of his family spread around the country, and his close friends for the years he had lived in Nashville.

Under such a microscope, it was no surprise that the story of the gathering Willinger had attended the evening before his disappearance would bubble to the surface. The police were intrigued by the story of Willinger’s companion for the evening. After pressing several of the witnesses, the police came away believing that no one knew for certain whether that companion had been male or female. And the person was difficult to locate, even