Cheerwine is Fine
Chapter One, by Al Perry
Image Courtesy Wikipedia
Call Enderton whatever you wish—a two-stoplight town off Interstate 40, an overgrown village with an inferiority complex, a bedroom community for Winston-Salem and Greensboro—but never say that folks who live there don’t know what’s going on. Word travels faster in Enderton than a stomach virus through a kindergarten class.
Before the ambulance carrying Richard Pemble left the town limits, siren screaming and lights flashing, a crowd of Enderton residents gathered at Henry’s General Store.
“Richard got shot,” one of his neighbors explained. “Walkin’ in the woods, right out there on his own property.”
“Hunter do it? Plenty deer around this season. I had to fence off my fruit trees right in my own backyard.”
“Dunno, but don’t think so. The sheriff ordered his deputies to keep everyone away. I heard one of ‘em talking on his radio. Said something about the National Guard bein’ called in.”
“Is Richard bad off?
“Dead, I’m told. Ellena, Richard’s wife, went off in the ambulance with him.”
“I saw her climb in,” a new arrival said. “That pretty little thing was bawling, wringing her hands, shaking all over. Awful.”
At 4:30 p.m., about an hour after the incident, Richard Pemble was pronounced dead at the trauma center in Winston-Salem. At the request of the sheriff, the State Bureau of Investigation launched its own investigation. Enderton was in the spotlight for the first time since, twenty years earlier, it was a contender for the site of a regional airport. That was when Richard Pemble’s 600 acres of farmland adjoining an interstate highway had generated wild speculation.
Now, the town’s largest landowner and its wealthiest citizen was a victim of violence.
Richard, in his early 50′s, also was one of Enderton’s most popular residents. He and his young bride both were active in church and civic affairs.
Rumors flew.
Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons
A front-page story in the next morning’s Winston-Salem Journal disposed of the hunting-accident theory. Quoting “anonymous but reliable sources,” the paper reported that Richard Pemble had been killed by shrapnel from some sort of bomb—an “improvised explosive device” or IED, the type of weapon used by terrorists in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Enderton story went national.