A Chance Encounter

Dale Morton let out a long stream of curses as his old Ford F-150 seemed to choke on its fuel, sputtering to a halt on the old dirt road. He wasn’t one to swear, so he gave an apologetic glance to the cross hanging from his rearview mirror as he hefted himself out of his truck to go take a look under the hood. Upon opening it, Dale was met with a rush of dark smoke and a blast of heat which nearly singed his eyebrows. Though he knew it was a lost cause before he even propped up his hood and got his tools, he tinkered around with the mechanical beast until the sun shone brightly in the west, turning the long yellow grass into a sea of gold. He may have found this beautiful, had it not been for his uncertain future. 

He was in the middle of nowhere, Oklahoma - a place he hadn’t ever been before, seeing as his growing up was done in Texas, where he had also worked for fifty years. He had been in Oklahoma City about an hour ago, but there was no chance of him walking back there, and if he was reading his map correctly, he wasn’t making it to Enid either. Looking around didn’t yield many hints, but he did spot a path in the grass towards the East which was too small for a car - perhaps there was a farmhouse nearby, or at least a barn where he could rest for the night. As he grabbed his cowboy hat (he was really Texan), and started walking on the path, he found himself sourly wishing he’d listened to his son and gotten a cellphone. 

About an hour later he was wheezing on the top of a hill, the sun now quite deep in the western sky. Fortunately, his intuition had been right: a ranch-style house sat comfortably a little ways from the bottom. When he got down there, he let himself catch his breath for a few minutes before knocking on the door, so as to appear more composed. However, he was very tired, and forgot to take his hat off as he knocked, a breach of courtesy which would have earned him a sure slap from his mother. 

There was silence in the house after his first bout of knocking. He frowned, trying to determine if there was anyone at home. The house was clearly inhabited - it was well kept, there was a truck in the driveway, and an empty glass stood on the porch, drawing flies. He decided to knock again before trying to open the door. On the third knock, the door opened suddenly and a young girl stared at him. 

“Hello?” her voice was miniscule.

“Well hi there!” said Dale, trying to keep his voice bright despite his exhaustion. “I know you don’t know me, but are there any grown ups I could talk to?”

Before she could answer, an older gentleman walked up behind her and said, “Dorothy, what did I say about opening doors without mommy or I?”

She pouted and moved off to the side. Dale reintroduced himself, “Good afternoon, I’m Dale Morton.”

“Hi, I’m John Leslie.” The man did not extend his hand, but also wasn’t particularly cold. His face was thin and his lips tight, but he appeared wary rather than standoffish. 

“Well listen, sir… I know this is gonna sound odd to you, but I was drivin’ my truck up on that road y’all got… oh must be a few miles west of here, and well… and the daggum thing broke down. Seeing as how I couldn’t make it back to the city, I saw the little path y’all got coming here and… I was wonderin’ if y’all would be so kind as to give me a place to stay for the night? Or maybe just a ride into the city on your own vehicle?”

John stared at him through calculating blue eyes. After several seconds, he said, “That truck don’t work right now, but come on in, we’ll give you a place to hunker down.” John smiled, the corners of his mouth stretching eerily close to his eyes. He extended his hand, which Jim shook with a small smile on his own round face. 

“Thank you kindly, sir… I appreciate it.”

“Oh, don’t call me ‘sir’ - call me John. Hey Marlene,” he added, calling out behind him, “Set the table for five tonight, and put on another steak!”

“You don’t have to cook for me, John,” said Dale quickly, “I ate in the city-”

“That musta been hours ago. Ain’t nobody that steps into my home that leaves without a meal, Dale. Let me take your hat.”

Dale realized his error in etiquette and chastised himself as he handed his hat to John, who hung it on a rack with a few of his own. The house itself was clean but looked very lived in and cozy. It reminded him of the house his brother Tom lived in out in North Carolina. 

“This is a really nice place, John,” he said earnestly.

John smiled, “Thank you. Please, if you need to wash up, go ahead. Bathroom is the second door on the left down that hall.” 

Dale’s heart was racing as he washed his hands in the bathroom. Something about John seemed odd - most likely his wide smile which never reached his eyes, but he was also about to dine and sleep at a stranger’s house… in his nearly seventy years of life, that was something he had not done. 

He found John in the living room near the door. “Thanks again, John.” 

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, “C’mon, let’s go eat. I don’t know how you like your steak, so I had it done medium-rare.”

“That’s perfect.”

John smiled. “Alright then.”

Their dining table was much larger than they could ever need, with room for at least twelve people. John moved to the head of the table, while Dorothy and Marlene, a pretty woman for her age, sat on his left, and a young man sat on his right. There was an empty space next to the young man, which Dale figured was his seat. 

“Dale, this is Marlene, my wife, and Jimmy, my son. You already met Dorothy.”

“Howdy,” said Dale, not entirely sure how to introduce himself to a new family.

“Nice to meet you,” Marlene’s smile was warmer than her husbands. “Please, sit. I’ll be right back with the food.”

Dale sank his heavy frame into the seat and looked at John and his children, who bore a striking resemblance to their father. Jimmy had the same thin face and bright blue eyes, while Dorothy’s mouth and ears were exactly like John’s. “So you folks from around here?” asked Dale, desperate to keep the conversation churning.

“Actually, we’re originally from Texas ourselves.” replied John.

“Oh, so am I!” said Dale, excited to find something in common with these people, “What part of Texas?” 

John shifted his gaze slightly to his children, but said in a firm voice, “We moved around a lot… hell, there ain’t a place in Texas we ain’t been, I reckon.”

“I’m from Waco myself… but I worked in Houston my whole life.” 

“We lived outside Houston for a while… ’bout five years… what’d you do there?” As John asked this, Marlene came into the dining room once again with plates of steak and potatoes, which she served to John and Dale first.

“Wow, this looks great. I was a detective, actually.”

John clenched his jaw and looked at Marlene with sharp eyes. Dorothy seemed uninterested by it all, but Jimmy narrowed his eyes a little. Dale saw this, but tried to play it off as a manifestation of his own nervousness, which he was projecting onto them. 

“That’s… nice. You retired now?” Marlene was the one to speak, though her voice seemed a lot tighter than it had been earlier - robbed of all of its warmth.

“Yeah, I retired last year, actually.” Dale began rapping his fingers on the table, wondering what had gone wrong.

“Let me help you with those last two steaks, dear,” said John suddenly, following his wife to the kitchen, “Oh, Dale - you want a beer?”

“Sure, thanks.” He wasn’t craving beer in the slightest. With John and Marlene gone, Dale tried to converse with the kids. “So Jimmy, how old are ya?”

“Fourteen,” he replied shortly. He did not meet Dale’s eyes, preferring to stare intently at his sister, who was playing with the tablecloth. 

“You in school?”

“Nah. Work on the land with dad.”

“I see… Well, what d’you want to do when you grow up?”

“Be like my dad… I mean, I wanna do what he does.”

“Oh? And what’s that?”

Jimmy turned to look at Dale as he said, “He works on the land.”

Dale remembered when his own son had been fourteen… clearly the snarkiness transcended generations. He tried to remain positive and decided to talk to Dorothy instead. “How about you, Dorothy? How old are you?”

“I’m six years old,” she said, apparently finding the process of sticking a fork into the tablecloth more interesting than Dale’s words.

John came back into the room with two Budweisers, both opened. He handed one to Dale and sat down himself. They nodded to each other and took a slow sip. Marlene carried the final two steaks into the room, with Jimmy’s significantly larger than Dorothy’s. A quick grace was said, led by John, and for some time after that the only sound which could be heard from the table was the clinking of knives and forks, and Dale complimenting Marlene on her cooking. 

When around two thirds of their dinners were over, their pace slowed and they were allowed to converse again. “So John, what’d you do in Houston?”

John swallowed and looked at his wife before answering, “I showed houses. I wasn’t a full time realtor, but realtor’s would get me to show ranch style houses like this.”

Dale wasn’t sure he’d heard of someone doing something like that before, so he asked, “Did you like doing it?” 

John shrugged. “I like working the land more… got us some cows in the barn and a whole lotta room out here.”

“I’ve been thinking about getting myself some land as well… maybe somewhere in Montana… like that Merle Haggard song.”

The whole family smiled at that. Dale laughed uneasily. He was spared from asking anymore questions by Jimmy, who turned to him and said, “How many cases you solve?”

“Jimmy, that’s not polite,” scolded his mother.

Dale, relieved to have some more lively conversation, said, “Oh I don’t know… over a hundred at least… but most of ’em were small, like gas station robberies.”

“You ever not solve any cases?”

He remembered similar questions being asked by his own son when he was Jimmy’s age. “Yeah, there were a few that got by me.”

“Like what?”

“Jimmy!” said John forcefully. “That is enough of that kind of talk. Don’t make me send you to your room in front of guests.”

“It’s quite alright… I mean there were a few that I really couldn’t get… one of ’em was just a minor robbery with a damn good robber and a heck of a lotta luck. Another was a case about a stolen horse… and then there was… another one.”

John froze with a bite in his mouth, staring daggers at Jimmy, who looked calmly at Dale. “What was that one about?”

“I uh… I don’t think it’s dinner table talk.”

“Jimmy…” warned Marlene.

“I want to hear it.” said Jimmy, impervious to his parent’s harsh looks. They all glanced at one another and seemed to come to some sort of consensus, though Dorothy was toying around with a green bean. John nodded at Dale and resumed chewing, seeming calmer now than he was before.

“Well okay… it was a grisly one… there was a family that lived around Houston that went missing out near an old abandoned ranch house. When we got to the place to ask the owners if they’d seen anything, we found the place empty and completely cleaned out. We thought perhaps there’d been robbers or something around there, because the tire tracks in the dirt near the garage were pretty fresh. But then we went into the cellar and found… we found the family down there… or what was left of ’em. And that wasn’t more than some bones and a leg. Hell, even the bones looked pretty clean. The folks that lived there musta… Lord it’s not easy to say this but… they musta eaten that poor family.”

“That’s awful!” cried Marlene, eating her steak nonchalantly.

“You never found out who did that?” asked John, who was listening intently but otherwise unperturbed. 

“There wasn’t enough evidence. The place was sorta on its own, Lord only knows why the family went out there in the first place. When we tried to look up who was staying there, the records showed no one… somehow. And then there was the lack of any prints or DNA in the place… and we ain’t have all the tech we did today back then… this musta been ten years ago. So we had no motive, no possible ID, not even a picture of the daggum truck that was in the driveway. We knew around what tread the tires were, but that didn’t narrow it down. We gave up after a few years… I thought there mighta been something in the house we didn’t check, because we did find a kid’s toy in there, and it did have some partial prints on it, but it wasn’t enough to find anyone.” Dale was clearly agitated, so he took a long sip of Budweiser and finished, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to go on about that.”

“It was interesting,” said Jimmy, applying himself once more to the last few bites of his steak.

The rest of the meal was passed in relative silence, after which Marlene went to make up the guest room for Dale and the kids went to bed after saying goodnight. Dale and John drank another beer in the living room, with John sitting on the couch looking tense, and Dale walking around, trying to work off his nervousness, which still hadn’t left him. 

“You said your truck’s on the main road out west?” asked John.

Dale nodded, taking a look at the family’s collection of pictures, which was small but organized nicely on a few shelves. “Yeah, it’s right out there. It’s a Ford F-150.”

“We can go out there and take a look at tomorrow.”

“Sounds great… I’m not that good with trucks.”

They were silent for some time, and eventually John grabbed a third beer from the kitchen. He and Marlene both got back to the living room at the same time, and though Dale did not see it, they gave each other a sharp look. Dale himself was staring intently at a particular picture on the shelf.

“What’s goin’ on, Dale?” asked John.

“Nothin'… I just feel like… I feel like I’ve seen this house before, that’s all.”

“Which house?” Marlene walked up next to him.

“The one in this picture.” Dale picked up the photograph and pointed to the house. Marlene gave it a dark glance and then looked at her husband, nodding. 

Dale put the pieces together just as he felt a shattering pain to the top of his head. He dropped heavily to the floor, unconscious before his head hit the ground.

“That was close,” said Marlene, patting Dale’s pockets and finding his keys and wallet. She threw both to John.

“Jimmy,” he called, “Get down here, boy.” When his son was present, John looked at him angrily and said, “Now listen here, boy… what you did today… that was unacceptable.”

“Well, we got somethin’ to eat now, don’t we?” rebutted his son, “I was tired of eatin’ those old steaks from the homeless guy last month.”

“Don’t talk back to me!”

“Did you give this guy what we were eating, mom?”

Marlene began tying Dale’s hands behind his back with a rope they kept in a nearby cabinet. “Listen to your father, Jimmy… and no, I gave him beef.”

“Fair-”

“Boy, you listen here!” John’s voice was getting dangerously uncontrolled, so Jimmy felt it’d be a good time to start listening. “Because you about messed it all up tonight by telling the damn detective who was investigating us what we do-”

“I didn’t-”

“Don’t interrupt me!” yelled John, quelling his son, “Because you were actin’ like a little brat at dinner, you gotta go and get his truck from the main road.”

“Oh c’mon, can’t we do that tomorrow?” complained Jimmy.

“It is a little cold out tonight, John,” whispered Marlene. 

John silenced both of them with a wildness in his eyes. “Take our damn truck and hitch his truck to it. Drive slowly back around to the house, and if you see anyone near you when you’re within sight of our drive, keep going until they’re out of sight and then loop back.”

Jimmy, accepting defeat, grabbed the keys from his dad’s hand and said, “Fine.” He slammed the door behind him.

“Daddy, isn’t that your job?” said Dorothy, who had crept into the room. 

“Yes honey, but Jimmy was a bad boy at dinner today,” said John. “Alright Marlene, let’s get this guy down to the basement… I reckon we could get at least a month outta him.”

“A month?” replied Marlene, grabbing Dale’s head, “I reckon at least three if we keep him right - look at how much he got on his legs.”

“You ain’t countin’ how much that boy of ours likes to eat… he could go through a leg a week himself.”

They bickered like this all the way down. Dale Morton did not see the sunrise.