Alright, let me figure out where exactly to begin this tale. It’s a bit confused and very rough around the edges, but hear me out.
Serendipity. Noun. A development of events by chance in a beneficial manner. Its ironic when you think about it. The town was named that because of its founding. It was a place where people travelling west for the California Gold Rush stopped for the evening due to a coming storm. Happenstance would have them there in the morning, when they saw the hints of a gold vein which the rain had revealed. And so, the small group of families stopped, and the town was founded, named after that concept.
Seventeen years later, the mine had dried out. People began to drift away, as they were wont to do. Chance had made the town, and chance went around and broke it. For a time, all that remained were those initial families and their descendants, building out the small mining town away from the mountainside and morphing it into a farming community. But, with the growth of the general population, more people moved into town. Not many, but some. Soon, the town was almost what one might call functional. It never became big, nor did it become wealthy, but the inhabitants were starkly independent and were perfectly content with it simply being functional.
Development was slow. Officially, the town was a part of the next city over’s school district, but no buses came. Not because they weren’t offered, but because every child in the town was a part of the community homeschooling network. The adults taught them the state and county curriculum, and whatever else they deemed important. To this day, we refuse to elect a mayor. We have our city council, comprised of three elected members of the families, three elected ‘outsiders’, and the oldest person in town. If the state ever would ask, the council would probably call the seventh member the mayor, but no one particularly cares about a town of forty people whose greatest export is kids trying to leave a town of a couple hundred people. The town doesn’t even have any municipal laws of its own. We mostly follow the county, state, and national laws, but that’s less out of interest and more out of a profound sense of obligation. Walking into town from the bus stop would feel like stepping out of the modern world and into an odd mix of the near future and distant past. The Jeffersons made sure that we had town-wide highspeed internet, emanating from the streets themselves. And yet, the buildings looked like they were either from the eighteen hundreds or the forties, and the people looked like they walked straight out of a movie set for a Cold War documentary, clothing ranging from the fifties to the seventies, then every once in awhile, some strange bearded man or serious woman wandered through in modern casualwear, generally causing people to doubletake. It wasn’t that we were stuck in the past. Here, we like to say time doesn’t exist. The past gets stuck in us.
So, the story. To understand the story, you have to understand the town. We’re not a place people stumble upon. People come here for one of two reasons: Because they want to find something, or because they want to make sure nothing finds them. People who do come here notice one thing immediately, too. Most people in this town are slow to trust and quick to judge. One wrong move, one rude comment, one askance look can tarnish the whole town’s opinion of you in a matter of hours. Which brings us to Jim’s horrid, filthy criminal. He got that idea more than most, and from what I knew about him, he probably felt much the same about the world at large. I think that might’ve been the reason why the whole town took a liking to him so quickly after he moved in. Despite the fact he never made even a hint of moving out of that basement, we really embraced Mikey into the town’s community. He was a part of this town.
I first met the kid before Jim ever saw him. He’d climbed out of that bus with his backpack and suitcase, and I went straight to the Town Hall, looking for the archives. He didn’t know that the town doesn’t keep archives, for tradition’s sake. People keep their own journals and report anything we deem necessary to report. He walked right up to me, because in uniform I suppose I looked in charge, and said, “Hey, could you point me in the direction of your town’s public records?”
I smiled and nodded. Lots of people come through looking for one of several rumors about this place. All of them are false, no one has ever found anything, but that doesn’t stop the people fishing for information. “Of course. Could I see some ID for our visitor logs?” I asked. We like to keep track of such things, in case anything goes missing.
He nodded. “Sure, sure,” he said, pulling out a money clip. No credit cards, no debit, just cash and a driver’s license. He yanked the license out from the clip and handed it over to me. “So, where do I go?”
I took it and could tell instantly it was fake. This ‘Michael Pergio’ was either a criminal, or a runner. Probably both. Now then, most cops might care about that, but half of this town was one of those things, at some point in time. Smiling, I replied, “Right this way, Michael” leading him back towards the small records room. As we walked, I added, “You know, we don’t keep as many records as you expect around here. Whatever you’re looking for, I doubt you’re going to find it in these papers.”
He laughed a practiced chuckle. “Who says I’m looking for anythang?” he asked, “I’m just here to write myself a piece on ghost towns that didn’t die.” He was a lying liar, of course, but I’d lived in this town long enough to know that a lie can often tell you more than the truth.
When we got to the room, I entered with him. “So,” I said, “Those two shelves are unlocked, they’re the public records.” I pointed at the two shelves forming the far corner from the door. “This shelf here isn’t open. It’s private.” I gestured to the one at my back, adjacent to the door. “Feel free to look around as much as you’d like, as long as nothing leaves the room.”
“Thank you, Sheriff,” he said with a nod of his head.
“Call me Anton,” I said to him with a halfhearted smile, “Everyone else in town does.”
He chuckled his honest laughter at that. “Seems kinda disrespectful, you ask me, Sheriff Anton.”
My half-hearted smile let out an equally enthused guffaw. “It’s meant to be, Michael.”
He nodded. “I see,” he said, “And, it’s Mikey.” He didn’t understand, not yet at least, but the words of comfort were helpful, nonetheless. I left him there, to read the public records and pick his way into the private ones. As long as he left everything in the room, it didn’t much matter what he looked at. You see, he wasn’t’ the first to go through those papers word for word, trying to decipher some nonexistent mystery about this town. He also hasn’t been the last. What he is, what he WAS, is the most successful.
And so, he kept coming back every day for about a week, reading every single document. At some point, the story goes that he met Jim, and the two of them hit it off. It’d make sense, after all, Jim was once in the same situation. As I said, half the town was a criminal or a runner at some point. Mikey was likely both. Jim certainly had been when he first came to town. We were both just teenagers at that point, but I remember it all the same. In any case, Jim and Mikey became something like friends, Pete came back from medical school, and Mikey started coming to the Town Hall less and less often, until one day he stopped all together.
A few weeks of radio silence from him, I was in my cruiser when I spotted him walking coffees to the Olivier boys’ construction crew. I pulled over and asked, “You want a ride?”
He nodded and hopped into the passenger seat beside me. As I pulled away, he asked me, “What’s going on?”
“I just haven’t seen you in a while. Are you doing alright?” I asked him.
“Sure, sure,” he said, very unconvincingly, “I just finished going through the record room for now, that’s all.”
I nodded. “Even all the private records?” I asked. I knew the answer was yes, but I was curious what he’d say.
Mikey smirked at me. “Of course not,” he said, “That’d be illegal, wouldn’t it?”
I shrugged. “Depends on whether anyone is looking,” I replied. I pulled up to the construction site.
Mikey nodded to me. “Thanks for the lift,” he said with a smile. Then, as he was getting out of the car, he added, “Don’t worry, Sheriff Anton. I think I’m onto something. You may be seeing more of me soon.” Then, closing the door, he walked away.
He didn’t come by for another two months. In the meantime, I kept up the rumor mill by visiting Linda, often. Linda’d grown quite fond of the vagrant that her dad had taken in. She never kissed and told, thank god for that, but what she did tell about was everyone else’s kisses, both literal and figurative. Being the only semblance of law in this lawless yet peaceable town, I liked to be kept appraised of any situations that might cause any sort of unrest. Or, at least, that’s what I told myself every time I visited Linda to get wasted and chat. Evidently, Mikey wasn’t actually seeing anyone according to Linda. His only connection to the town was his collection of fish, which grew both rapidly and arbitrarily. I knew better than that, of course, so I put on my sleuthing hat.
Mikey was meticulous, too meticulous to just randomly get himself fish. His first fish he picked up with Pete due to wanting to get settled in town, but the others were too irregularly spaced to just be when he was feeling like it. There was something behind each fish, so I went to the pet shop and asked for the records Ralph kept on pickups. He laughed and gave me the Mikey-Fish file. He knew that was what I was after, though I suspect he thought it was more to do with the Mikey-Linda situation than the Mikey-Town mystery. I then went to my parents and asked them for our town wireless use records. I’d already spoofed his phone; I could use our connection records to track him and his searches on days that he ordered fish.
My mother was hesitant to hand over the records, citing something about freedom of information and government encroachment, though I knew it was actually because of the whole leaving the family thing. On the other hand, my father, Kev Jefferson, was more than happy to hand over the information. He saw in my eyes that it wasn’t about a girl, it was about the secrets. The town was built on them, and knowing Mikey, he might be drawing close to a few. Not what he thought he was getting close to, of course, but things with, let’s call it other, implications.
Looking through the records on the days, I followed his phone as, the evenings before he purchased new fish, he saved a bunch of photos to the cloud. Using my digital version of his phone, I looked through those photos. It seemed he was taking pictures of people’s private diaries on those days, specifically for the year 1893. He was looking for the lost ton, a local myth. There was no lost ton, but there were other things that could come up with his investigation into the year. With heavy heart, I decided I needed to stop him. I called up the Pauls about it, to warn them as I suspected they were next, and headed to my apartment.
The next day, I did my morning patrol and saw Jim and Mikey having an argument about something near the bus station. Mikey was carrying the full aquarium in one arm and his suitcase in the other. As Jim stormed away, Mikey shot me a halfhearted smile, then sat down. Before I could make my way over to him, the bus pulled into the station, and he got onto it. I finished my patrol and went back to the Town Hall. I never saw Mikey again. However, pinned to the desk in the Town Hall’s record room, where no one had been officially in days, was a note. ‘I know about Ryer. I just want to talk.’ was all that it said. On the back, there was a phone number. I never called it. I burned the note. I had to, there was too much at stake. What’s adding one more secret to the foundation of the town, I figured. It was certainly better than taking one out and risking collapse.