Eileen Parker was met at the depot in Fort Stockton by Her mother, Judith Walker.  Judith had taken a cab to the depot, her car having been confiscated along with most everything else.  After a ceremonial hug on the platform, Eileen’s things were tossed in the trunk of the taxi and they headed to the Naughty Pine Motel where Judith had already secured a room.

“Do you want to explain what the hell is going on?” Eileen asked in the backseat of the cab.  The driver’s eyes darted up to the rearview mirror, as if was very interested, himself.  

Judith patted her daughter’s knee and said, “All in good time dear.  You’ve had a long train ride.  Better you freshen up and we’ll talk at the motel.”  Eileen suddenly understood the need for discretion, turned her head and gazed out the window in silence.  The taxi dropped them off in front of Room 4, the driver helped get the bags to the door.  Judith stopped him there and told him they could handle the rest.

Once inside the motel room with the thin chintz curtains drawn and the deadbolt on the door locked, the pair of women sat down at the small table by the window. There was a bottle of cheap Scotch, already opened in the middle of the table.  Judith had taken the paper wrapped glasses from the small tray on the dresser and put them on the table before she sat down.

Once seated, she took the paper off the glasses and poured them each a drink.  Eileen had never had a drink with her mother before.  She’d consumed her fair share in Fort Worth while at TCU.  She was sure that her mother and Ratliff were regular drinkers, probably the expensive stuff.  But this was a first.

“From the beginning, Ratliff said this was a possibility.  I figured so much time had gone by that the chance of it actually happening was pretty slim.  I was wrong.” Judith took a long sip from the glass.

“I need more information,” Eileen said.

“I understand,” Judith replied.  “I wish I could provide it.  I asked questions at first.  Each one was met with the same answer, which was no answer at all.  It was clear from the beginning that I would accept the situation on its face value if the relationship was to continue.  I told you I couldn’t be alone.”

“Not really much of an explanation.”

“You needed a father.  I needed a husband.  Loyd did not leave us in the best financial situation,” Judith explained.  “Ratliff checked off every one of those boxes, and a few others.  Right place, right time, I suppose.  I quit asking questions.”

“What do you know about the men who came and took him?” Eileen asked.

“Only what I’ve told you, which is to say: nothing.” Judith poured more Scotch into the glass.  Eileen hadn’t touched hers.  “He never told me who it was that might show up, or why.  But he made it clear that, if it ever happened, I would probably never see him again.”  Judith was quiet for a minute.  “He said to move on and not look back.”

“That’s it?  That’s all you know?”  Eileen was incredulous.

“They took everything.  I was able to pack a couple bags, as they watched.  They dropped me here.  I didn’t know where else to go.  I called you from the motel office and then waited here in the room till the cab came to take me to the depot.  It’s been a long day.”  Judith was more calm than most women would have been.  Maybe she was in shock.  Maybe she’d thought about this the last fourteen years and all the emotions had already played out.

“What do we do now?” Eileen asked, still trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

“Tomorrow morning we go to Prairie View Savings & Loan.  There’s a safe deposit box there.  It’s in your name.  Ratliff set it up that way, just in case.  There’s $10,000 cash in the box,”  Judith said. Eileen’s eyes lit up from the sheer audacity of it.  “We’ve got to get a car and a place to stay.  Then we’ll figure the rest of it out.  I don’t think we’re in any danger, but we have to be careful.”

Another glass of Scotch helped Judith drift off to sleep.  The whole rest of the bottle couldn’t have helped Eileen.

The next morning they made their way to Manny’s Motor Mart after stopping by Prairie View Savings & Loan and getting $800 out of the safe deposit box.  “Best thing I can put you in, dollar for dollar, is going to be this ’49 Buick Super Estate wagon right here.  Low miles.  Good condition.  Cheap price.  They haven’t made real wood station wagons in years.  Too expensive to maintain if you’re trying to keep it brand new lookin’.  But in terms of rock solid value and dependability, especially with your budget, this’d be the one.”  Manny seemed to be honestly trying to do right by the two women.  Eileen talked him down from $600 to $500 using feminine skills Judith had never seen her daughter exhibit before.

They drove the Buick back to the Naughty Pine, checked out, and headed straight for the Alamo Arms Apartments.  The landlady was expecting a lot more of a story as to why they wanted the last two bedroom unit available.  She was destined to be disappointed.  Her disappointment led to a $20 increase in the deposit.  “It’s a shame that all disappointments aren’t that cheap,” Judith told her daughter when they got into the small, furnished apartment.

“I’ll go over to the Piggly Wiggly and pick up enough to stock the Frigidaire for the next couple days.  You can unpack our things.  It shouldn’t take long.  There isn’t much left,” Eileen told her mother.  She grabbed the keys to the Buick and headed out the door.

“Keep an eye out,” Judith said as she walked out the door.

“For what?”

“I wish I knew,” her mother said.

Getting into the Buick Super Estate, Eileen looked around at the car closely for the first time.  The Buick reminded her of her father.  And his new Buick.  And her first day of school when he was parked outside waiting for her all day long.  She wished there had been a Ford available, but then she thought about Ratliff Walker and the string of Fords that followed him as he muscled his way into the void that her father had left.  She couldn’t let her mind wander too long on that subject or she might lose her way to the Piggly Wiggly.  “Another time,” she thought.  The wagon was as far from the Sunliner convertible she’d left in the pouring rain yesterday morning in Fort Worth as it could be.

The interior of the big green beast of the Buick was jumentous with the windows all rolled up, something she hadn’t noticed when Manny was extolling its virtues.  Maybe there would be something she could find at the grocery store to help with that.

On the way to the Piggly Wiggly, Eileen drove past the offices of the Stockton Telegram-Dispatch.  There was a sign in the window saying HELP WANTED.  Driving past the same window after buying groceries and realizing how much money they had remaining of the $800 they’d started out with in the morning, Eileen vowed to be at there when they opened the next morning to see about getting work.

Two days later, Eileen was the first person folks saw behind the counter when they walked into the newspaper office.  Perry Silverman, owner and editor of the Telegram-Dispatch, was happy to hire Eileen for what was little more than a receptionist position.  Over time that developed into more responsibilities that made better use of Eileen’s talent for writing.  Perry would send her out to cover some relatively routine or mundane event and Eileen would write a story that made people actually want to read about it.  The assignments grew to be more important over time and within a few years Perry hired a receptionist to replace Eileen so she could write for the paper full time, something unusual for a woman at the time.

Some around town thought there may have been something going on between Perry Silverman and Eileen Parker that was more than employer-employee.  Of course Trixie, over at the Klip-N-Dye, stirred that pot.  Nature abhors a vacuum, especially one that could involve salaciousness.  In the absence of facts, speculation filled the void.  Jack Beers, photographer for the STD said there was nothing to the rumors, and he was around the two of them more than anyone else.  “He only says that because they are so good at hiding what’s going on,” Trixie would note to anyone sitting in front of her getting her hair done.  “Mark my words.”

Back at the Alamo Arms apartment, Judith seemed to grow depressed at having suddenly lost a second husband, and without the benefit of much warning.  She found those feelings of loss were best soothed with bourbon and temporary companionship with men she’d met who were grieving their own losses.  Working late at the newspaper afforded Eileen the opportunity to not be subjected to the sounds that would emote from her mother’s room across the hall from her own.  Leaving for the office early in the Buick allowed Eileen to mostly dodge the uncomfortable encounters with a less than fully dressed strange ‘gentleman’ having coffee at her kitchen table.

In 1966 Perry sent Eileen to cover the strange death of a young woman in the Ropers Motel in Pecos, Texas not too far away.  Perry had learned that Eileen’s best work involved victims and subjects that would scare most writers off, especially female writers.  Eileen embraced them.  The more suspicious the circumstances, the better Eileen’s story would be.  Her background of being right on the edge of tragedy her entire life seemed to suit her willingness to dive into the macabre.  Maybe that was a gift Evelyn McHale tossed her on the way down to the roof of the family Cadillac parked just outside the Empire State Building.  The Telegram-Dispatch had to run second editions of the issues that covered Eileen’s series, What Really Happened to Pecos Jane.  That hadn’t happened since the Kennedy Assassination three years earlier.

Numbers from the Department of Justice indicate that there are 40,000 unidentified bodies stored in evidence rooms or buried in unmarked graves across America. Some are victims of horrible crimes, others involved in accidents.  Others are victims of death by their own hand.  All unidentified, their stories never discovered or told.  Their families often left wondering whatever happened to them, their questions never answered.  Pecos Jane prompted Eileen to start digging around some of those cases and see if she could find the real stories behind the headlines.

In late February of 1969 Eileen parked the Buick Super Estate out front of the Alamo Arms and noted that the light in her mother’s bedroom wasn’t on, an odd occurrence.  Inside the apartment, Judith was sitting upright in the old wing chair next to a side table with a nearly empty jelly glass on it.  Her head was bowed down, but not in prayer.  Just like when she had discovered her father behind the wheel of his Buick, Judith was the first to find what was left when her mother had gone to see Jesus.

The day after the simple service at Second Baptist, Eileen went into Perry’s office at the paper and closed the door.  “I need some time off.  I need to get out of that apartment.  I need to get out of Fort Stockton.  I’ve been reading everything I can find on murders that took place in Texarkana back in the forties. Never solved.  Someone killed five people over ten weeks and was never caught. I think there’s a book there.  I want to write it.”

“How long do you need?” Perry asked her.

“Dunno.  Eight or nine months.  Maybe a year.”  Eileen already had everything packed up in the back of the Buick, out in front of the newspaper offices.

“What will you do for money?”  Perry seemed concerned that she hadn’t thought everything out.

“I’ve got some cash my stepfather left us before . . . well, before he left us.  I’ll be alright.”

“I’ll cover you for a year.  Same salary you’re making now.  Send me drafts as you  finish chapters and I’ll help you edit them.  When it’s done, we can run serialized excerpts of the book in the STD.  It’ll help you sell books, help me recoup the expense of paying you while you write it.”  Perry was generous to a fault and a master of thinking on the fly.  “Is that old Buick woody going to make it to Texarkana and back?”

Eileen glanced out the window at the faded green ’49 Buick Super Estate and snickered.  “That ol’ Buick has become the most stable thing I’ve ever had in my life.  It’ll get me there and back.”  She stood up, went around to the other side of the desk and gave Perry a big tight embrace.  Jack Beers walked in right about then and was surprised to see through the glass door leading to Perry’s office what was taking place inside.  A moment later, Eileen passed him on her way out to the Buick.  “Take care.  I’ll be gone for a while.”  

Jack told Trixie the next time he saw her at the Lucky Lady,  “Maybe you were right.”