Chapter 22
John and Sharon got into Mrs. Heartbreak’s van and Sharon buckled up as John switched on the key. The long parade of bikesters finally ended and John cranked his body around to see if anyone else was behind him. His neck was barely mobile; it had begun to fuse up with age and even small acts of observation like looking left and right involved twisting his waist followed by much huffing and puffing from the expended energy. Sharon began to feel like a hostage; she made a note never to be John’s passenger again.
A large and spanking new Winnebago bearing Iowa license plates rolled through Blue Eye and slowly passed the rear of the van. From John’s contorted position he was able to read the Iowa State motto on the plate—‘I Brake for Hogs’—and a bumper sticker with ‘In Case of Rapture this Car is Driverless.’
Because John was wondering why people felt compelled to publish gibberish and rude sayings on flat but unlikely surfaces, he missed seeing the driver. It was Clara Jane Staley, also known as Clara Jane Smith ne’ Clara Rinker, in casual flight from her home in Forrest City, Iowa where she and her husband, retired FBI Agent Orin Staley, owned a Winnebago dealership.
Had John seen her, he would have been delighted. When Clara Jane lived in Berryville—gosh, what, five years ago?—she had engineered and delivered a successful plan to reconstitute the legions of dour and tightfisted Iowa based tourists—who visited the Ozarks during the off season to take advantage of the discounts on hotel rooms in Eureka Springs—into consumers, with the happy result of a significant increase in purchases of dollar books at Heartbreak’s Pretty Good Books and Really Dreadful Coffee.
John believed that Clara Jane’s success was due to the intervention of the Holy Ghost, Who had begun appearing to John, off and on that spring and summer, wearing a Wartburg College sweatshirt and short shorts. The matter of the shorts stuck in John’s mind long after the event because the HG’s knees were visibly double-jointed, and His legs were really (really) hairy. John also remembered how delighted the HG was by Clara Jane’s leading the group of Iowans he’d commanded to appear on the Berryville Town Square in a stirring rendition of that old hymn, ‘In Heaven There is No Beer.’ Memorable events indeed, friends.
These exciting happenings and the aftermath are completely told in the book Coffee with John Heartbreak: a Mostly True Story of Berryville, Arkansas, available at www.Amazon.com and better bookstores everywhere. It is sufficient to say here, however, that John and Clara Jane had a productive, reciprocal, and warm friendship. He had missed her when she had moved to Forrest City with Agent Staley.
I suppose, if you have been paying attention to the four paragraphs above this one—where I introduced you to Clara Jane and gave a brief summary of her and John’s relational highpoints—that you’re thinking that I have complicated our story by bringing Clara Jane into it.
You have no idea.
Let me go over the back story as quickly as possible, even as I assure you that the details are necessary; it makes possible our understanding of how Clara Jane and the Warrior Queen Sloan will become mortal enemies, conspire each to do away with the other, and in a thrilling, novelistic climax, wrestle at the high sharp edge of a precipice—in a scene so similar to the one Conan Doyle penned about Holmes’ final duel with Professor Moriarty that it seems stolen (so, of course it is)—where only one emerges alive.
Clara Jane was born Clara Rinker in the little town of Tisdale, Missouri. Her upbringing, social class, and geographical location (20 miles NW of Blue Eye), had made her a fully vetted Appalachian American at birth. As Lyle Lovett would say, a ‘Redneck Woman.’ Needless to say—but let me say it anyway—she fit into Berryville as seamlessly as a Tim LaHaye novel fits into the mind of a Schizophrenic Conspiracy Theorist. So:
Clara Jane is five feet four inches tall, give or take a couple of inches. She weighs 130 pounds, give or take five pounds, and is exactly thirty-five years old, give or take five years. She is an occasional brunette, sometimes a blond, but never a redhead unless you count strawberry blonds as redheads. She wears glasses although her vision is 20-20. When she is not AWOL from her husband and driving a Winnebago Motor Home (not the Winnie-Minnie but the Big Expensive one) she drives a Toyota Camry or, when she previously lived in Berryville, that most non-descript of automobiles, an aging Ford Taurus. She is, if you get my drift, an expert at being and not being: now you see her. Now you don’t.
Although Clara Jane is completely real to John Heartbreak, neither of us can be sure that she is real—in the strict sense of real; but then what is? Is John real? Is Ishmael real? Are the Bible’s Abraham and Isaac real? No, no, maybe, you say. What they all have in common is that they are in books. They all have a creator (Creator) and at least one of them thinks exactly like his creator (Creator) wants him to think. And because he thinks, well, Cogito ergo su—especially since she herself feels unreal at times.
But John can see her. That’s good enough for him and, isn’t it good enough for you? Five four—give or take an inch, dishwater blond, funny eyeglasses? BIG Winnebago. Pretty in a sort of indefinable way. You can see her, right? Oh. Clara Jane is also a serial killer. Did I forget to mention that?
Or as John will tell you, Clara Jane is a retired serial killer. When she first came to Berryville, she and John ran into each other at the Evil Retail Giant. John was buying a pair of socks—get this people: there is only ONE retail outlet in the entirety of Carroll County where you can buy a pair of socks!—and Clara Jane was testing the comparative tensile strength of a couple of bowie knife knock-offs back at the gun counter. She knew that indentation harness correlates linearly with tensile strength for most steels, and hardness testing is a fairly economical substitute for…oh. You don’t care. Okay, then.
So…Clara Jane was buying a knife and happened to see John staring at her in recognition. John, an inveterate reader of John Sanford mysteries, instantly knew who she was despite (in spite of?) her see me, no see me regalia. She, recognizing his recognition, immediately began planning how to kill him—defenestration was a favorite method, but since there are no windows in Berryville big enough, or buildings tall enough, to make defenestration practical, she settled on the most economical tensile strength test of all (sticking) and chose the off brand bowie knife (Chinese, but it was nearly $20 cheaper, can you believe!) to do John in.
Clara Jane was about to move in for the kill when she was uncharacteristically disarmed by his directly approaching her with the offer of employment. He had some pesky, cheapskate Iowans to deal with, you see.
Here’s where it gets complicated.
Clara Jane assumed that John’s job offer—help me get rid of these Iowans!—involved killing them. While it is true that John had briefly considered that maximum option, the book in which this whole mess is thoroughly described is also handicapped by a NO SEX, NO VIOLENCE and NO STRONG LANGUAGE (NSNVNSL) clause, thus mitigating that satisfying but ultimately Legion of Decency disallowing opportunity.
How frustrating, she’d thought at the time. Since her first killing, let’s see, she was seventeen and had whacked Besom Slider with a hatchet, Clara Jane had killed twenty nine men and three women by various means, including that old favorite, defenestration. That would make a yearly average of 1.88 dead ones and, with all that practice, she’d gotten really good at it. Too bad, so sad, that John wouldn’t permit her to boost her average a tad!
This account may lead you to think that Clara Jane is a bad person. To her credit, the folks she’d ‘hit’ would make nearly everyone’s short list for elimination. Besom Slider, for example…well, considering the NSNVNSL clause, I can’t tell you why Besom deserved to die…but he did. And so it was with each of the other 32 people Clara Jane laid to rest; they had spent their lives victimizing mostly defenseless people and, if you are an eye for eye sort of person, or a Dirty Harry, Charles Bronson, Quentin Tarantino fan well, there you have all the justification you—and Clara Jane—need.
John’s and subsequently Clara Jane’s problem was that Iowans didn’t really qualify for the death penalty. True, they were tightfisted and self righteous and Lutheran to the core and wouldn’t pay full price for a book even if was a church approved copy of the Kama Sutra. And though nearly all of them had grown wealthy on Corn Welfare from Uncle Sugar and were (are) the First Cause of why 80% of your diet (no kidding—you can look it up) contains corn (which is why Americans are obese), those facts by themselves didn’t really meet Pitch from a High Window Criteria. So, how were they to change the disgraceful behavior of Iowa Tourists?
Ultimately John and Clara Jane opted for a SHAZAM-like, miracle based strategy that worked okay (just okay), but had the unforeseen and unintended consequence of causing Clara Jane to reform and become a Methodist. Yes, she followed the advice of Walter Scott--the evangelist, not the author--and did the old to Five Finger Exercise: found faith, repented, confessed her faith, was baptized, and began living the Christian life.
John and Mrs. Heartbreak had been hopeful that Clara Jane would choose their church, the First Christian Church Disciples of Christ, as her home church. But Clara Jane had, like so many new Christians, gone church shopping. After weeks of observing the local vicars, she picked Pastor Skip French and the First Methodist Church of Berryville. Clara Jane liked Skip—he was an Arkansas Razorbacks fan and thus, soft on felons—and she felt reassured that the expansiveness of the Methodist’s parking lot would facilitate quick getaways on the off chance that such need would arise.
Clara Jane stayed in Berryville after the successful Iowa Tourist Miracle. It was a safe town to hide out in—who would believe that a serial killer would live in Berryville, Arkansas?—and in no time at all she was tightly woven the fabric of the Community. She kept a tidy yard on Pritchard Street right across from where John and Mrs. Heartbreak lived, opened an ‘Iowa Welcome Center’ on the Town Square with support from the local Merchants’ Association (thank you, Melinda Large, and all you Merchants!), and like most residents, shopped at the Evil Retail Giant an average of 3.5 times a week.
As she became more and more real, at least as real as anyone in Berryville is real, she met and fell in love with Orin Staley, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation assigned to the Ozarks for the purpose of guarding Beaver Dam from terrorists who might be vacationing in the area. What cock-up had caused the Agent’s tenure in the Berryville area is not known, but soon after falling head over heels for Clara Jane, he retired from the Bureau, married her at the First Methodist Church, and took his bride home to Forrest City, Iowa to meet Mother Staley. They stayed, they opened a Winnebago Dealership, they joined another First Methodist Church, they settled in, they settled, settled…settled…
It is not known to John, nor do I know for that matter (I mean, it could go either way) if the Holy Ghost remained in contact the new Mrs. Staley after she and Agent Staley ‘settled in-to’ married life. What I do know is that Clara Jane found the Forrest City Methodist Church sufficiently lacking that she went church shopping again; she was looking for ‘something more’ some indefinable ‘thing’ that might salt the otherwise bland stew of flat Methodist theology, flat Winnebago sales, and the flatly relentless but uninspired needs of the retired federal civil servant she had haplessly become latched to.
One night, Mother Staley invited Clara Jane to investigate a new church in town, The Church of God with Signs Following, which had rented a storefront in Forrest City’s devolving downtown. She had felt oddly comforted by the small group that had assembled that Wednesday evening and, for a moment, felt as though she was back home in Tisdale, Missouri. When the preacher, Sincerely Dwayne Wayne Darby—‘They call me Sincerely because I am!’—bounded onto the small stage set up at the front of the store and said:
‘Thank God, I will get a view of the Battle of Armageddon from the grandstand seat of the heavens! All who are born again will see the Battle of Armageddon, but it will be from the skies! Let us remember one thing, we Christians are sheltered from the coming of the approaching storm!”
In a matter of minutes Sincerely Dwayne Wayne held the small audience in the palm of his honest, working class, callused hand. Clara Jane was not exempt; she had been transported back to her childhood, with all its known comforts and primitive impulses. She felt a hot flash run up her spine and chills roll down her shoulders and into her hands. Oh, what a switch from Methodist hot dishes!
Pastor Darby’s sermon was an encouragement to be ready for the Rapture, which he compared to NASA. Thusly, he preached:
“You know we’re spending a fortune on this space program. A fortune! If they’d just shut it down, see, and wait for the sound of the trumpet, that, my friends, is going to be one space program! I’ve got my name, by the grace and help of God, in that other space program. You know the one where you don’t need no big missile over in Florida to put you in the air?
“Why don’t you do it tonight, Jesus? Do it tonight!”
Mother Staley was unmoved by Sincerely Dwayne Wayne’s exhortations, but Clara Jane was. She joined The Church of God with Signs Following, and even convinced her husband to donate a reconditioned Mini-Winnie to the church so that Pastor Darby wouldn’t have to sleep in his car anymore.
“You feel better, don’t you,” she said to Agent Staley. “Really. Right?”
Agent Staley Ret. nodded.
After months of attendance, she found the courage to confide in Sincerely, and told him all—all—about her past. Sincerely, who Judged Her Not, chose that moment to share his Dispensationalist opinion that, “ it was all going come out in the wash pretty quick, and didn’t the scum need to die anyway?
“God Blesses you, Clara Jane”, he said, “For doing His work, when Local, State, Federal, and International Law Enforcement—and all them other lily-livered Liberal girly men—are too Godless and Jesus-less to do it!
“You should think of your past as glorious, Clara Jane. Don’t ever regret doing the work of the Lord. Not now, not then, not in the future. Jesus is coming soon, and with his Raptured Saints, he will slay millions with the power of his words, and the hem of his robe will be stained crimson as he wades through the oceans of blood he sheds.”
Life within The Church of God with Signs Following, and within the sight of Pastor Darby, was exciting and made everything without it second best. Pretty boring in fact. She needed to make some changes.
After services last Sunday, she told Sincerely Dwayne Wayne that she needed to go back to Berryville for a few days. He smiled and nodded.
Today she is in Blue Eye.
