Shoot the Moon

by Billie Letts

Genres: Small Town & Rural; Mystery

Synopsis

In 1972, the town of DeClare, Oklahoma, was consumed by the terrifying murder of Gaylene Harjo and the disappearance of her baby, Nicky Jack. When the child's pajama bottoms were found on the banks of Willow Creek, everyone feared Nicky Jack was dead, although his body was never found.Nearly 30 years later, Nicky Jack mysteriously returns to DeClare. His sudden reappearance will stun the people of DeClare and stir up long-buried emotions and memories. But what Nicky Jack discovers among the people who remember the night he vanished is far more than he, or anyone, bargains for. Piece by piece, what emerges is a story of dashed hopes, desperate love, and a shocking act with repercussions that will cry out for justice...and redemption.

Full of the authentic heartland characters that Billie Letts writes about so beautifully, Shoot the Moon is a hypnotic tale filled with suspense and emotional truth. It further establishes Billie Letts as an American writer to be reckoned with, an original storyteller whose words go straight to our heart.

Release date: July 1, 2004

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 352

Sample

Prologue

Back when it happened, back in 1972, there wasn’t an adult in the county who didn’t know every detail of the crime.

Lige Haney, editor of the DeClare Democrat, kept the story on the front page for months. Of course, other news made the headlines now and then—a spring flood washed out the Post Road Bridge; two local boys, the Standingdeer brothers, were wounded in Vietnam on the same day; and a fire downtown gutted TenPenny Hardware and the Hungry Hawk Café.

But none of the news had the staying power of murder and abduction—a young mother stabbed to death, her ten-month-old son missing—the worst crime ever committed in DeClare, Oklahoma.

Television news teams came in from all over the state, their trucks and vans lining the town square, where most of the reporters used the courthouse as a backdrop for their broadcasts.

Lantana Mitchell, a twenty-one-year-old rookie with KWTV in Tulsa, wasn’t the brightest of the bunch, but she was the most eager and certainly the best looking, which gave her an edge over the older, more experienced reporters. At least with Oliver Boyd Daniels.

Daniels, deputy sheriff of DeClare, was a mean drunk; a tough-talking, tough-looking guy; a man’s man who appealed to women despite missing part of one ear and three teeth, the gap in his mouth covered by an ill-fitting bridge. He was also husband to a wife much younger than him; and father of an eight-year-old boy with Down syndrome. He lost the teeth and the piece of ear in a bar fight in Baton Rouge. He found the wife, his third, when she was leading cheers at a DeClare High School football game.

But Lantana Mitchell was looking for her big break in the news business, so she welcomed the deputy into her room at the Riverfront Motel every night for the ten days she was in town covering the story.

Daniels promised to feed her inside information about the crime; she promised him she wouldn’t use his nickname, “O Boy,” on the air.

In the end, they both lied . . . he because Lantana wouldn’t do everything he wanted her to do in bed; she because Daniels didn’t tell her about the missing boy’s pajama bottoms he found on the bank of Willow Creek.

Instead, he leaked that news to Arthur McFadden, his half-brother, in exchange for a used bass boat. Because they had different fathers, their likeness was not striking; Arthur was shorter, thinner and less robust than O Boy.

But both had inherited the cold blue eyes of their mother, eyes that could veil all emotions except one—anger. And like her, drunk or sober, they could be intimidating and cruel. The major difference in the brothers’ personalities, though, was that Arthur could come across as charming when a situation demanded it, an ability O Boy neither possessed nor understood.

Arthur owned and operated the local daytime radio station, KSET, which was on the air from sunup until sundown, seven days a week.

Arthur loved the station, rarely regretting the sacrifices he’d made to own it, even though his work was never-ending. He read the news, weather and farm reports; prerecorded all the commercials; conducted live interviews regarding every event in the county; read the public service announcements; did all the billing and bookkeeping; answered the phone; paid the bills; and hosted Swap Shop, a local favorite on which listeners called in to buy, sell or trade fresh eggs, car parts, hunting dogs, baby beds, hand-stitched quilts, lawn mowers and junk of all descriptions—new or used.

The only other person involved in the day-to-day operation of KSET was Kyle Leander, Arthur’s twenty-five-year-old stepson. Kyle, who had discovered psychedelic drugs the year he flunked out of Yale, deejayed an afternoon show he called Catharsis, during which he played acid rock, read excerpts from Carlos Castaneda and quoted Timothy Leary.

Arthur hated Catharsis just a little more than he hated Kyle, but it was Kyle’s mother, Anne, a wealthy widow from Atlanta and Arthur’s current wife, who had put up the money to buy KSET. And Kyle’s job, which paid him twenty-five hundred a month, was part of the bargain.

But Arthur didn’t have to deal with Kyle on the day he broke the news of the discovery of the kidnapped child’s pajama bottoms because Kyle was in rehab, shipped off to a high-dollar clinic called Restoration in North Carolina to dry out again. And that suited Arthur just fine. He had the station all to himself and filled the Catharsis time slot with a live interview with O Boy Daniels, who predicted the case would be solved within days, if not within hours.

Until then, there’d been no real break in the crime—no fingerprints or tire tracks, no murder weapon, no strangers in town that anyone could remember. No clues at all as to who had killed the young woman and taken her little boy.

But now, with something to go on—a pair of blue pajama pants with yellow ducks—the community roared into action.

Hap Duchamp, president of the First National Bank, offered a reward for information leading to a conviction. Of course, no one ever claimed the money because the man arrested and jailed on suspicion never made it to the courtroom.

Most folks, though, especially the locals, were less interested in the money than they were in helping to find the missing child.

Matthew Donaldson, the fire chief, put out a call for volunteers, and for the next ten days, firemen, policemen and too many civilians poured into DeClare from all over the country. Four major search teams were formed, and by the end of the week, the hunt was going on twenty-four hours a day.

Swanson’s Funeral Home provided a tent under which the DeClare Ladies’ Auxiliary set up tables, where they made sure food and drinks were always available to those involved in the search. Teeve Harjo, whose husband, Navy, owned the local pool hall and booked sports bets, put herself in charge, making sure the ham sandwiches were fresh and the coffeepot was never empty.

The DAR, not to be outdone by the Auxiliary, whom they regarded as a rough bunch lacking social grace and breeding, contributed enough Purina Dog Chow to feed all the tracking dogs being brought in by their handlers. The suggestion came from Martha Bernard Duchamp, the club historian, whose great-grandfather had been killed at Gettysburg; whose grandfather had made a fortune in cotton; whose father had started the First National Bank; whose son was now its president.

John Majors, owner of Majors’ Office Supply, printed a thousand flyers with the missing boy’s picture, which the Boy Scouts tacked to every telephone pole in town and taped in the windows of all the businesses on Main Street.

The Young Democrats bought several hundred yards of yellow ribbon, which the high school choir kids cut up and tied to every tree in DeClare except for the half-dozen Chinese elms in Raymond Cruddup’s front lawn.

Raymond claimed that the trees were too delicate to be disturbed. Raymond Cruddup was the town grump.

The churches of DeClare organized round-the-clock prayer circles, where prayers were offered up for the little boy’s safe return. Many of the circles continued their supplications for weeks, long after most doubted there would be a return—safe or not.

Even so, preachers used the tragedy of the crime as the theme for Sunday sermons, and for months afterward baptizings increased, as did church memberships, especially at Goodwill Baptist, the largest church in town.

Patti Frazier, the organist at Goodwill Baptist, wrote a song about the kidnapping, a tune she called “Gone Missing.” Encouraged by the response of the congregation when she sang her composition at a Wednesday night service, Patti recorded “Gone Missing” on her tape recorder and gave a copy to Arthur McFadden, who played it every hour on KSET.

But 1972, the year little Nicky Jack Harjo disappeared, was a long time ago. Over a quarter of a century. And much had changed since then.

TenPenny Hardware was rebuilt soon after the fire that destroyed it, but business fell off after Wal-Mart came to town, and the TenPenny closed its doors in 1984.

The Hungry Hawk Café, razed in the same blaze that took the hardware store, was never rebuilt, but six years later a McDonald’s opened on the same site.

Lige Haney continued to edit the Democrat until diabetes began to rob him of his sight. Finally, in 1986, he sold the paper to a news conglomerate buying up small-town weeklies all over the country, and he and his wife, Clara, retired to Florida. Four years later, having endured two hurricanes, they gave up on the Sunshine State and returned to DeClare. But just two weeks after they’d moved back, a tornado swept through the eastern edge of town, destroying their new home. Fortunately, Lige, Clara and Phantom, Lige’s Seeing Eye Dog, a sturdy blond Lab, survived unharmed in their basement.

Soon after rebuilding, Lige went back to the work he had always loved by writing a weekly column called “Statecraft” that he dictated to Clara, who typed the pieces on Lige’s old Smith-Corona. “Statecraft” focused on Oklahoma politics and reflected Lige’s “yellow dog” Democratic viewpoints, which did not set well with the Republican ownership but was a favorite with locals.

Television news teams returned to DeClare occasionally in the intervening years, but only twice for major stories. They came back when an ice storm on the interstate caused a pileup of thirteen cars that killed four teenagers on their way to a basketball game; then again to cover a triple homicide on Bois D’Arc Road, the result of a drug deal gone bad.

But neither event brought Lantana Mitchell back to the community. After the O Boy Daniels’ fiasco, which left her with a pregnancy she terminated with an abortion in Kansas City, she learned to use her looks and ambition with more discretion.

Two years following her stint in DeClare, she attended a media convention in Chicago, where she met and charmed an executive with ABC—a man with both ears, all his teeth and no wife. After Lantana nudged him into marriage, he made her anchor of the evening news in Los Angeles.

The marriage didn’t last, nor did the job, but a hefty divorce settlement allowed her to return to Tulsa, where she wrote four nonfiction crime books, one of which was published.

O Boy Daniels hit a rough patch in the early eighties when he nearly beat to death a county prisoner suspected by many in the community to be a pedophile but who was most certainly going to get out of a conviction because of a legal technicality.

O Boy claimed the prisoner was trying to escape, but the jury, even though they believed the child molester deserved a good beating, couldn’t buy the lie because of the restrictions placed on them by the presiding judge.

After serving two years at the state penitentiary, O Boy returned to DeClare, opened a bait shop near the river and moved back in with his wife, Carrie, the former cheerleader, and their disabled son, Kippy.

Five years later, O Boy ran for sheriff and won, even though the law prohibited him, a convicted felon, from carrying a firearm. Apparently, the voters of DeClare figured O Boy was tough enough that he didn’t need a weapon.

Arthur McFadden continued to operate the radio station after his wife divorced him and moved back to Atlanta. Arthur’s only regret about the split was that the terms of the divorce left him stuck with Kyle Leander for as long as Kyle wanted to keep his job at the station. And Kyle had no intention of leaving.

Hap Duchamp served as president of the First National Bank until 1980, when rumors began to circulate that he was a homosexual. He resigned before he was removed by the board of directors, and with the law degree he’d earned from Tulsa University twenty years earlier, he started his own small practice. Then, relieved of the pretense of being straight, he and his lover, Matthew Donaldson, former fire chief, moved in together in an elegant A-frame they built in a wooded area near the river.

Teeve Harjo was still active in the Ladies’ Auxiliary but had less time to devote to the organization than she had years earlier. Her husband, Navy, had sneaked out of town one night, taking his new Buick, on which he’d made only three payments, and over twenty thousand dollars he’d taken in wagers on a Cowboys’ game. In addition to Teeve, he left behind his young daughter, a second mortgage on the house and a lot of angry gamblers.

But the pool hall was paid for, so, with no other income and limited job skills, Teeve took over the operation the day after Navy left. Instead of being the disaster that most predicted, Teeve turned out to have a good head for business. She added a couple of video games, stopped booking bets and selling beer so teenagers could come in to play and turned the storage area into a tiny lunchroom, where she served sandwiches and her popular peanut-butter pies made from a secret family recipe. Five years after Navy left, Teeve’s Place was thriving.

Martha Bernard Duchamp, DAR historian, took up drink-ing soon after her son’s “coming out.” In the beginning, she was able to conceal her newly acquired taste, but by the time she fell and broke her hip in 1985, everyone in DeClare knew she had her Jack Daniel’s delivered by the case from Ritzy’s Liquor Store.

Raymond Cruddup died in 1987, his Chinese elms in an ice storm the following winter.

Patti Frazier’s song “Gone Missing” was recorded by a gospel quartet on an album titled “In God’s Hands.” When the album did well on the Christian music charts, Patti sold three more of her songs and made enough money to buy the Riverfront Motel when the owner put it on the market.

By 1999, the population of DeClare, Oklahoma, had risen to seven thousand, about a thousand more than what it was in 1972. The business district downtown had spilled over from Main Street to State Street three blocks away, and two small industries had relocated to the county.

Crime across the country had grown to such frightening levels that TV and newspaper accounts of mass murders, school killings, rape and child abuse had become routine.

But the old-timers, the ones who had lived through the murder of Gaylene Harjo and the abduction of her son, would occasionally rehash the crime as if it had happened only the day before.

Now, twenty-seven years after the boy’s disappearance, the hundreds of yellow ribbons tied to trees by the high school choir had rotted and dropped away. And the flyers posted everywhere the Boy Scouts could make them stick were gone.

All except one.

Yellowed and brittled with age, a flyer with the little boy’s picture was still taped to the window of Teeve’s Place.

Chapter One

His early morning flight from Los Angeles had been delayed for nearly two hours because of fog. Plenty of time for him to back out, just let it all go. Once he even grabbed his bag and left the terminal, but he changed his mind. Again.

After boarding, he found himself seated next to an elderly woman who was weeping quietly. She was still crying when, twenty minutes later, she offered a whispered apology, but he pretended sleep. Whatever her problem was, he didn’t want to hear it. He had no interest in hearing people whine.

When she left her seat to go to the lavatory, he slipped from the first-class cabin and found an empty row near the back of the plane.

For a while he tried to read but gave it up when he felt a headache coming on. He hadn’t slept at all the night before, hadn’t even gone to bed. Instead, he’d spent the hours sitting on his balcony, trying to persuade himself not to make this trip.

Then, just before five that morning, he’d phoned to make his flight reservation, left a vague message on his receptionist’s answering machine and pulled a suitcase from his closet.

Now, with his stomach churning from too much airport coffee, his knees wedged against the seat in front of him, his body heavy with fatigue, he decided that when the plane landed, he’d give this up. Take the next available flight back to L.A.

But he didn’t.

After he picked up his rental, a Mitsubishi Eclipse, and a map at Tulsa International Airport, he headed east.

The Avis blue-chip car, the only convertible available, wouldn’t have been his first choice; he drove a Jaguar XK8 in L.A. But even before he drove out of the city, he realized he’d underestimated the Oklahoma heat, well over a hundred, with humidity so high that his shirt was plastered to his back despite the hot wind.

The two-hour drive took him through mostly empty country, the highway skirting towns called Coweta, Tullahassee, Oktaha—names that conjured scenes of Gene Autry movies.

He arrived in DeClare before dark, then checked into the Riverfront Motel, which looked just a little more inviting than the White Buffalo Inn at the edge of town or a decrepit hotel called the Saddletree a few blocks away.

His room was about what he expected. Drab and cramped, smaller even than the dorm room he’d lived in at Tufts for five years. Behind the drapes he found sliding glass doors leading to a balcony that overlooked a river backed by woods of towering pines.

He didn’t bother to unpack, but he hadn’t brought much anyway. He wasn’t planning to stick around long.

The motel restaurant was crowded, according to his waitress, because it was Thursday.

“Catfish night,” she explained, managing to turn “night” into a three-syllable word. “All you can eat for six ninety-five.”

“Is it baked?” he asked, a question she thought was hilarious.

“You’re not an Okie, are you? Only one way to fix catfish, and that’s to fry it. You want baked fish, be here for the Sunday buffet. We have baked cod then. But come before noon, ’cause when the churches let out, this place is packed.”

“I’ll be gone before Sunday.”

“Not staying long, huh?”

Though he’d already framed the lie, he hesitated. Another chance to back out.

“I’m here to look up some old friends of my parents.”

“Who’s that?”

He felt his heart quicken, his breath come short. But he was in it now.

“A family named Harjo.”

“Which one? We got Harjos scattered all over this part of the country. They’re all related, one way or another. Ben was the oldest, I think.”

“Where can I find him?”

“He’s dead, but his wife, Enid, lives way the hell out in the boonies. Can’t tell you how to get there. Your best bet is Teeve. She was married to a Harjo. He took off years ago, but she’s still close to the family. She runs the pool hall on Main Street.”

After his dinner, and with enough fat in his system to grease axle rods, he walked to the center of town. Four depressing blocks scarred by struggle and failure. Buildings of crumbling native stone, many of them empty; a boarded-up movie theater, its marquee advertising a citywide garage sale; a bank wearing a new facade, the centerpiece a massive clock running an hour late.

Business owners battling the Wal-Mart east of town had tried to lure customers back by installing canvas awnings, camouflaging peeling paint with cheap brick veneer, placing wrought-iron benches on the corner of every block. But the awnings were tattered and fading, the veneer was flaking paint and the benches were covered with pigeon droppings.

The pool hall, closed by the time he got there, didn’t look as if it were faring any better than other businesses he’d passed along the way. The sign reading TEEVE’S PLACE hung crookedly over the door, and the plate glass window fronting the building bore a foot-long crack patched with caulk and masking tape.

Inside, a fluorescent bulb blinked in a tin ceiling pitted with rust. The long, narrow room was crowded with a makeshift counter, pool tables from another era, video games, vending machines and a game table with four mismatched chairs.

As he turned and started back toward the motel, a mud-splattered pickup drove by, a rifle mounted in the back window, a Confederate flag strapped across the grille, two pit bull pups chained in the truck bed.

If he’d been back home just then, he might have been cussing the traffic clogging the 405 or complaining of the heavy brown air dimming the sun or fighting the panic he felt when a tremor hit.

But at that moment, Los Angeles seemed like paradise.

Chapter Two

Teeve Harjo unlocked the front door of the pool hall while balancing four pie boxes against her chest. A. . .