Chapter 1
In the middle of nowhere Kansas sat the little unincorporated town of Elmwood. The town was dead—a ghost town that had been going to ruin since the 1980s. Elmwood had never been a big town, a few hundred residents at its peak. Elmwood had existed as a place of commerce and community for the small farmers in the area.
The roads had never been paved, always gravel that was graded a few times each year by the county road maintainer. There was a downtown area. The only strip of road that was wide enough for two cars to pass by one another without one having to pull damn near into the ditch. Along that wide strip of road were the businesses that made the town possible. Now, however, the buildings stood like silent sentinels of a bygone era, their wooden fronts warped and weathered, paint peeling off in long, jagged strips.
Right in the center of the downtown area was the Elmwood town hall. This building was not only the site of city council meetings but also served as the town’s community center where the old folks would gather to play cards and gossip. Now, it was a shell of its former self, the windows boarded up, and an air of neglect hanging around it like a shroud.
Beside the town hall was the only watering hole in town, a little ramshackle bar with a distinctive wild west style wood front. The bar’s sign swung ominously in the wind, creaking like an ancient ghost. In fact, most of the downtown buildings were built from wood, a testament to the once-abundant elm trees that grew along Elm Creek, which wound its way along the northern edge of town. The elm trees were where the town took its name, but now the trees themselves seemed to mourn, their twisted branches reaching out like skeletal fingers.
Other businesses dotted the street on either side of the town hall. There was a little post office which served the ladies in town as yet another place of gossip, now standing desolate, its door hanging off one hinge. A little hardware store where the men would gather to complain about the rising cost of this or that or the other, now a haven for dust and shadows. On the west edge of the downtown street, the repair shop was the only building built with concrete. Two gas pumps were out front where Old John was seen most days leaning up against one of the pumps when he didn’t have a machine in the repair bay to work on. Old John fixed just about anything from your lawn mower to the family car to tractors. He would even be seen occasionally repairing washing machines and refrigerators in his shop. The shop now stood eerily quiet, a ghost of its bustling past.
Old John was married to Ellie. Ellie had the only brick building in town—a café on the first floor and rooms to rent on the second floor. Her building was on the east edge of the road. Ellie started her day cooking breakfast in the café. She served up the best bacon and eggs or biscuits and gravy you would eat anywhere. That was a good thing because that was all she had on the breakfast menu besides a hot cup of coffee and orange juice. She also fed hungry men lunch. On the menu was nothing other than cheeseburgers and fries. You could have a slice of homemade pie for dessert or even take a whole pie home for later. The soda fountain had Coke, Dr. Pepper, and Mountain Dew. If you didn’t like that, you got water.
Now, the café was but a haunting reminder of better days, the smell of Ellie’s famous cooking a distant memory. The rooms upstairs had long since gone unoccupied, their windows dark and silent, watching over the decaying street below.
Across the street from the café was a little playground and a small wooden schoolhouse that used to house grades 1-8. Not many kids went to school past the 8th grade in these parts because the nearest high school was a good 25 miles away. So, kids that went past 8th grade got home-schooled by their mothers at a time when homeschooling was a necessity rather than the popular thing to do. Mrs. Boyd had been the only teacher at that school, teaching all grades since the school opened, it seemed, back in those days. There had been other teachers before her, but she had stayed the longest. She didn’t retire until the day she had what folks called a massive coronary while teaching math and collapsed dead in front of her students.
Beyond that, the rest of the town was laid out in square blocks. Most of the houses were modest single-story bungalows with two and sometimes three bedrooms. A few of the houses were actually two stories, owned by the wealthier people in town. But they were all pretty much the same, built from elm wood that had been cut down nearby and milled into lumber by Carl, who owned most of the wooded land along the creek and had set up a sawmill just outside of the town limits. Most days residents could hear the hum of Carl’s chainsaw as he felled another tree or the ringing of the big round blade at the mill as he cut the trees into lumber.
At the very edge of town sat an old Methodist Church. It was the first building built in Elmwood in 1886. It was small but stood tall with its bell steeple against the backdrop of big old elms. Just beside the church was the Elmwood cemetery surrounded by a wrought iron fence with an arch at the entrance where a wooden sign once hung that said Elmwood Cemetery. The cemetery was a haunting place, with gravestones dating back to the early 1800’s before Elmwood was officially a town. Most of the headstones were large and imposing, their inscriptions long faded and unreadable, eroded by the relentless passage of time. Some had crumbled entirely, leaving only jagged remnants jutting out from the overgrown grass.
