The Lost Queen of Crocker County: A Novel Read online

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  Copyright © 2018 by Elizabeth Leiknes

  Cover and internal design © 2018 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by Connie Gabbert

  Cover image © Massonstock/Getty Images

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  Fax: (630) 961-2168

  sourcebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Leiknes, Elizabeth, author.

  Title: The lost queen of Crocker County : a novel / Elizabeth Leiknes.

  Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Landmark, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017040811 | (softcover : acid-free paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: City and town life--Fiction. | Homecoming--Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3612.E35884 L67 2018 | DDC 813/.6--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017040811

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Epilogue

  Reading Group Guide

  A Conversation with the Author

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For my husband, John

  “Follow your bliss, and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.”

  —Joseph Campbell

  Prologue

  1983

  A faint but undeniable ear of corn lived on my left calf. I was born with it, a six-and-a-half-inch birthmark filled with alternating light-dark-light-dark pigmentation, which created a pattern that can only be described as corncob-like.

  “It won’t come off, Mama,” I said, scrubbing.

  Mama was having none of it. “Now, we’ve talked about this, Janie Marie Willow. This is a part of you.” She touched my shoulder and sat down next to me and Strawberry Shortcake on my bed. “This is who you are.”

  “But the kids at school call me Corncob.” I scrubbed some more, the hot washcloth rubbing my skin raw.

  Mama took the rag from my hand and looked at my leg. “You know what they call birthmarks in Italy?”

  I just squinted at her.

  “Voglia. And in Spanish, deseo.” Mama patted my leg. “But no matter the language, Janie, the translation of the word ‘birthmark’ always means the same thing—‘wish.’” She tucked my blond hair behind my ear. “A birthmark is a mother’s secret wish for her child,” she said, smiling. “Your daddy and I wanted you so badly, and you are marked with that love.” She traced her index finger around my birthmark. “You are our hope. Our dream.”

  But why mark me with corn? I was already surrounded by it. Did Mama think I was going to somehow run out?

  She kissed my forehead like a mother does, walked over to my bedroom door, and said one last thing before going downstairs to make supper. “Never forget where you come from, Janie Willow. It’s the surest way to get lost in this world.”

  No way. I would always be surrounded by cornfields, because I was never going to leave. This was home. This was where I belonged.

  I glanced up at the picture hanging on my bedroom wall, a framed poster with the word Iowa spelled out in bold block letters at the top. The center of the poster featured Des Moines and the state capital building surrounded by other midwestern fare—a John Deere combine, grain silos, farmhouses dotting the hills, a fiery sun disappearing into endless cornfields—but my favorite part of the picture, the part I would remember for the rest of my life, was the miniscule depiction of the rest of the world. On the outskirts of the poster, small versions of larger-than-life world landmarks—the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, the Acropolis—jutted out like mere cartoon afterthoughts, leaving my truth in the middle of the poster, in the middle of the heartland: Iowa was the center of the world.

  Chapter One

  Present Day

  I’m in a dark room with James Bond again.

  The interloping morning sun tries to peek through my thick office blinds. To be clear, I’m on a couch and Mr. Bond is on a projection screen, but we are sharing something together. This scene, the one I watch more than I should, is both the best and the worst of life, a scene that saves me from my daylight.

  A tuxedoed Bond smiles at his newlywed wife in her gown, white chiffon scarf blowing in the wind. They talk of a sunny future while the Aston Martin, adorned with pink and white wedding roses, hums down the ocean-side highway. Bond pulls to the side of the road to remove the flowers from the hood and kiss her. Just then, his arch enemy drives by and sprays the car with machine gun bullets before it continues down the road. James Bond remains unscathed, as he does, but not Tracy—no, not Tracy.

  The broken Bond holds his slain bride and kisses her dress. When he speaks, I speak. “She’s simply resting,” he tells the policeman, and my chest tightens as fate plays out on screen. I pause when Bond pauses. His past is too much to run from
. It is his fault and he knows it. Like I always do, I let him carry the guilt. “There’s no hurry now,” he says. “We have all the time in the world.”

  I close my eyes while the credits creep by.

  “Jane, are you done yet?” And then knocking.

  Damn.

  In a practiced maneuver, I turn off the projector, turn on the lights, open the blinds, and let in the harsh LA sunshine. I sit down in my father’s old oak desk, a sturdy reminder of where I come from. I look out the window at the clear view of the Hollywood hills in the distance. Humanity exists, somewhere, ten floors down, but the closest I can get to it are the faces staring at me when I swivel my chair back around to see four framed movie posters—Moonraker, Big Fish, Magnolia, The Wizard of Oz—hanging on my office wall.

  I glance over at the fifth movie poster resting on the floor, propped up against the wall in the corner of my office. A birthday gift from my parents five years ago. Every time I try to hang it up, I can’t. Some stories need to be earned, and I am not worthy of this one. Maybe someday I will be able to watch that film again, hear the proverbial ringing bell and the stars talking to one another, sorting out the logistics of a lost soul. But for now, when loneliness wears me down, I look at them, Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed, smiling, grateful, surrounded by children and love, and I am struck by the impossibility of a second chance at life.

  Sidney knocks again.

  “Coming,” I stall. I put James Bond back in his DVD case, erasing all traces of nostalgia, an unsavory notion in the world of critics. By now, the whole city is reading what I think of Hollywood’s recent indie-breakout-film-turned-Oscar-buzzworthy hit, The Hole of Schmidt, an in-depth drama about a man and his hole.

  I finally let in Sidney Parker, my editor for the last ten years. He walks into my office sporting jet lag and a serious tan, even for LA. The trepidation over what he might have missed while he was gone shows on his face. He’s come back from vacation on a Friday in anticipation of my latest assignment. He takes the newspaper tucked under his arm and places it, along with a to-go coffee cup, on my desk. When he stretches out his arms, I go in for a welcome-home hug, but I know what he wants. He wants to know that it’s all going to be okay. All editors force small talk, pretend to be casual, but what they really want to know, to hear, is that you’ve not only met a deadline, but that you’ve done so without making enemies in Hollywood, the epicenter of all things movies.

  “So…finished? In the paper today, right?” Sidney says, brow raised, a smile pending the right answer. “Tell me you didn’t call the most anticipated film of the year a piece of crap or something.” His almost-smile fades, replaced by panic. “Jane?”

  “Not exactly.”

  When I wrote the review last week, my diction changed with each breath. At first, I’d typed uninspired, then backspaced, typed soulless, backspaced again, then whispered to no one, “It is what it is,” and retyped the harsh truth: excrement. But the words ended up evolving, sentence by sentence, becoming more accurate, really. So accurate, in fact, they became the title of my review. Incessant revision is a habit I’ve inherited from my father, who has always believed nothing is ever a final draft, even one’s words. I save the act of reviewing, reliving, and revising to the only place it works: on the page.

  Sidney buries his face in his hands. He stands before me in his tweed-for-Friday vest, always expensive and always tailored, looking a bit like a deranged Gregory Peck prepared to kill his beloved mockingbird who sometimes sings songs he doesn’t like. He runs his hand over his dark hair, a gesture that tells me he doesn’t know what to do next. Sid has an affinity for anything classic and prefers the good old-fashioned newspaper print to the ever-ready online world, so when he opens the newspaper rather than grab his phone, I’m not surprised.

  I try not to cringe as he rifles through the paper, page by page, toward the film reviews. He stops. His finger traces an invisible line from Cinegirl’s caricature in the top left of the page to the headline title of my review.

  Wait for it.

  “‘What a Schmidt Hole’?” he screams. He shakes the newspaper at me. “‘What a Schmidt Hole’?” he screams again, like he doesn’t believe his own voice. “I’m only gone six days and I come home to this shit storm?”

  “Schmidt storm,” I correct him, feeling out the revision as the words hang in the air.

  “You called the most anticipated film of the year a piece of crap.”

  “Excrement, actually,” I say, “and then Schmidt Hole, but never—”

  “Listen, Jane.” Sidney takes a breath, tries to calm himself. “Remember?” he says as he points to the Gotham Award hanging on my wall. “Let me remind you what they said about you. ‘Jane Willow’s prose’”—his hands frame an imaginary headline—“‘straddles both auteur and blockbuster films…her writing is startling, explosive, sophisticated.’” Sidney softens. “Cinegirl is the most widely read… Would it kill you to throw Nick a bone?”

  “I don’t write for Nick, or any other director, Sid. He’ll get over it. I loved his last film.” I swipe my bangs away from my face. “I just really hate this one.”

  I really do hate this film. I don’t tell Sidney that it reminds me of the giant hole in my life. I don’t tell him that I hate that this Schmidt character thinks he can dig his way to redemption. I don’t tell him that I hate this film because it has the audacity to find hope amid dismal circumstances.

  I glance at the framed picture of my parents placed on the farthest corner of my desk. My dad, the only lawyer in my hometown of True City, Iowa, was considered our unofficial judge by popular opinion and can smell the faintest hint of horse crap long before the closing argument. He has English and law degrees from the University of Iowa, but his no-nonsense sensibility makes him well loved by his coffee-shop friends, some who didn’t even graduate high school. I begin to mimic my dad’s voice, which captures Bobby Knight’s intensity, a convincing tone booming from each word. “People want the truth, kid. You’re a bullshit detector…” I say, just like Dad says all the time. “You get that from me.”

  Sidney, who has listened to stories about my dad over the years, leans forward in his chair, probably his way of acknowledging my hereditary predisposition for detecting excrement. “But this is an art house film, Jane.” Speaking of bullshit, I smell it as Sidney continues. “It’s got some really cutting-edge scenes, like…”

  “Like the nine-minute scene featuring”—I drum roll on my desk with two pencils—“the many nuances of dirt! Very avant-garde. And Hole of Schmidt? Really?”

  “It’s a double meaning. Whole of Schmidt. I think.” He gestures a rough outline of a person and then shrugs. A shrug from Sidney means defeat. “The whole man. You know…”

  I do know. When I’m watching movies, talking about movies, thinking about movies, I feel whole. I’m no expert on life, but I know movies. They are sacred to me. Once, when I got into an intellectual scuffle with a who’s-who producer, I ended up having to see a therapist because the owner of the Times, Sid’s boss’s boss, demanded that a professional try to diagnose why I didn’t “play well with others.” The therapist said I was clinically fine but socially detached, likely from some sort of emotional trauma, which shut the big-times up for a while. What all of these idiots don’t know is that I don’t see life like them, through simple, rudimentary visual cues. I see everything like a cinematographer in perpetual record mode, comparing each image to scenes from films I hold dear. The problem is, real life never holds up.

  “He’s digging a hole to end world hunger, Sid.” I throw up my hands. “World hunger should never be in the same sentence as a man’s hole.”

  “So, you didn’t feel even a little—”

  “I felt hungry, Sid!” I snorted. “Alert the morality police. I felt hungry in a movie about world hunger.” I raised my pointer finger. “Okay, first of all, it was forty-five minutes too long, and s
econd”—I raised another finger—“it somehow managed to be a heartless film about a heartrending topic.” I raised only my third, middle finger in the universal fuck-off position. “It was a self-indulgent, masturbatory romp, and Nick Wrightman should strangle himself with his own film. God knows there should be loads of it on the cutting-room floor, because he’ll never work again.”

  “You’re kind of scary when you talk,” Sid said.

  I pucker my lips into a pout, but deep down I know I’m right. Nick Wrightman will never work again—he’s used up his chance. I used to believe in second chances. But that was Before. The Before Jane thought about things like that, believed in things like that. I’m After Jane, linguistically tidy but caustic and jaded, like an honest, brazen film review. Eloquent yet unforgivable.

  “No, Jane, I mean it,” Sidney says, demanding eye contact. “In print, you’re formidable, but when you speak…you destroy people.”

  I wait a beat and say, “Get the sand out of your vagina, Sidney Poitier Parker.”

  Sidney’s parents, third-generation Los Angelenos who loved their city and who loved movies, named Sidney after one of the greatest actors of their time. When I want to ask Sidney to catch a bite to eat, I ask in my most convincing tone, “Guess who’s coming to dinner?” He always says yes, because that’s what self-appointed father figures do.

  In my assessment, the most accurate reduction of a person’s personality is finding out their favorite movie. If someone asks Sid what his favorite movie is, he’ll say Citizen Kane because it’s a respectable answer for an editor of serious film criticism, but Sid’s real, secret favorite movie is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I happen to know this. I also happen to know that deep down, he is a lovable outlaw masquerading in the City of Angels, secretly defying his destiny. Heart over art sometimes. We all have our secrets.

  Instead of a rebuttal, Sidney looks up on the wall at the framed first-run edition of my weekly column, Cinegirl, featuring a cartoon-drawing likeness of me: Bridget Bardot meets Debbie Harry, my pronounced upturned nose further exaggerated. I wonder if Sidney is comparing us, me and Cinegirl, with our sixties-inspired mascara and wild hair. The only difference between us is Cinegirl’s perma-smile and seemingly perky attitude.