Chapter 1
Prologue: Call of the Wild, or They Heard It Through the Grapevine
During these last twenty years, our fair town of Merryweather lost any claim to talking about “the outskirts of town." This change in labels for the fringes of our formerly fruit-farm community came about pretty predictably, since it happens any place with a little natural beauty, temperate weather, and a charming downtown district. That is to say: over a nice Pinot picked up on her last winery-tour weekend, some chatterbox with plenty of money ends up rhapsodizing to her friends from the swirl-swish-and-swallow crowd about getting away from the rat-race through blissful self-exile to “the country.” En masse, her nip-and-tuck friends end up convincing their mates that a migration to pastures new (or at least to property taxes lower) is a Good Idea.
Thus, our Merryweather fell victim to the gentrifying invasion of the chatterbox and her friends. In their fresh-off-the-lot jacked-up SUVs, these grandmotherly barbarians charged into town like archers atop war elephants, armed with Sunset, Southern Living, Country Living, Country Home, French Country Style, Architectural Digest, Bon Appétit, and/or Martha Stewart Living, not to mention the platinum edition DVD boxed-set of This Old House (complete with the Bob Vila action figures for the grandkids).In those exciting days of yore, these wildcatting hell-for-leather matriarchs—when not on weekend treasure hunts for vintage fixtures and period stained glass or berry-picking to make that perfect Amish cobbler, followed up by a drumming circle at Barb’s—pushed through all that legislation that established strict noise and vagrancy laws, banned plastic shopping bags and fracking, turned the nearby swamp into a wetland, founded the Berryweather High Summer Fruit Festival, required all of the parks to post informational signs about the prehistory of the long-gone native peoples, and set up both the Farmers and Saturday Markets. Due to their efforts, within five years our Merryweather was sporting those neo-Arcadian necessities of a yoga studio, a Saab dealership, and an organic bakery selling creations with no calories, the hillsides ’round about became scattered with housing developments like fast-food boxes dropped from the sky, and flower baskets hung at every downtown intersection. (Flower baskets strategically hung from lampposts are the long-recognized funeral bouquet of every sleepy small town before it is reborn as a Merryweather.)
However, that magical age of confusion and creation ended about ten years back when bud blight struck all the vineyards hereabouts, the winery-tour weekends slowed, and the real estate market flattened. By then, though, Merryweather had settled into its status as an upscale rural enclave.
This wordy preamble should rivet down the point that, before the invasion of the luxury SUVs and the vegan pet food stores, there was a time when our town did possess “outskirts,” acres of grass, weeds, and rusting farm equipment, those bucolic, all-American, red-barn vistas maybe seen in the end-of-the-year calendar sent out by your insurance broker, or acted as the setting for a secret place of inner healing and reconfiguration. This is just what Dr. Phineas Fairfax founded when he appeared in Merryweather just ahead of the rusticating grandmas and in those “outskirts,” far off any main road, set up the Orphis New Life Exit-Counselling Clinic.
With the history lesson out of the way, we turn to the present, because right now, a poor sucker is tied up in a car trunk and the air is running out.
