Free Murder in Little Egypt by Darcy O'Brien Page A

of thing. He must have known what he was going to do from the start. He had simply been awaiting an opportunity to return.
    Marian sought to discover some fault in herself, some selfish lack of understanding that might have contributed to Dale’s secretiveness about his plans. Maybe she had enjoyed New York and Washington too much. Maybe she had been too obviously enthusiastic about things like the Muni Opera in St. Louis. But she could only conclude that the circumstances of Dale’s divorce outweighed any other possible factors behind his silence. In some obscure way, he was returning to southern Illinois to prove something: that he could succeed there without Helen Jean and without Dr. Pearce’s help.
    Marian chose to believe that once he had established himself down there, Dale would no longer have anything to prove and would feel free to move on again. After a couple of years, three or four at the most, they would be able to return to St. Louis or go on to some other city. Surely Dale would eventually chafe at the limitations of southern Illinois. She had never imagined him as a man content with low horizons. She would try to make the best of the move and to count on the future. She decided to draw on some of her mother’s cheerfulness: How lucky she felt compared to what her mother had faced with never a complaint!
    Marian did not visit McLeansboro before moving there. Dale said that he would take care of everything. He made several trips down to secure a house and make it ready for her. His mother was eager to help. He and Noma would fix the place up, hang new wallpaper, lay in the essentials.
    Marian appreciated Dale’s apparent eagerness to please, but as September approached she had to struggle to conceal her sadness at leaving St. Louis and the friends and relatives she loved. To her brother, to Uncle Eddie Bell and the Yards she spoke only of the excitement of a new life and the challenge of Dale’s having his first practice and a hospital to run, but the hundred and fifty miles to southern Illinois began to seem a thousand. She could not get the coal pits out of her mind, and it was as if the streets and parks and tall buildings of St. Louis were begging her to stay.
    It had been a long time since she had written any poetry, but one night when Dale was down in southern Illinois she sat at her kitchen table and this came to her:

The night is cool.
The soft summer air comes through the window
brushes my hair,
and is gone.
I watch the city.
Its lights throw shining beams
like a million stars
each undisturbed
by the city’s din.
I see smokestacks.
Silhouetted against the brightness
the smoke curls,
lingers and drifts away.
A train goes by.
Its lonely whistle,
Its monotonous roll presses onward.
The sound fades.
Listen! The wind.
My eyelids droop.
The night’s characters blur
To dreams that won’t come true.
But there’s tomorrow—
    It was a common saying among the men of Little Egypt that if you wanted to give the state of Illinois an enema, you would inject the nozzle at McLeansboro. Half the size of Eldorado and with fewer trees, the town had lost whatever point it might once have had, a remnant without so much as a bar to enliven it. In all of Hamilton County, which in area was bigger than St. Louis County and of which McLeansboro was the seat, there were only nine thousand people; the county courthouse in the middle of the town was McLeansboro’s principal attraction. Oil had been discovered in the county in 1939, and a few farmers had profited with their one-eighth royalties from leases on their land; but because most of the money, like that from the coal mines, went to absentee owners, who brought in skilled workers from Oklahoma and Texas to do the drilling and maintain the rigs, oil had not meant the prosperity McLeansboro had dreamed of when the local newspaper had cheered in a headline running across the front page:
    HURRAH! WE’LL ALL WEAR DIAMONDS!
    The house Dale selected was out in the