Daydee, a forty year old hooker from New Orleans, clicking on her heels on arrival in Paris Illinois in her dated fashionable clothes, off the bus with luggage. Winston, a friendly guy in his seventies who was her mother’s friend, was supposed to meet her, but isn’t there. She tries to find directions to the apartment building she has inherited. She checks her bags unto a locker and starts out to walk. Winston finds her walking through the downtown. He takes her to the apartment.
Winston takes her to the local breakfast place in the morning and introduces her around. Preacher, who went to high school with Daydde, is there. Winston takes her to cemetery to her mother’s fresh grave. Winston knows The Preacher will run off to see the Lawyer, who was another classmate from the high school- big local football hero.
Winston shows her around the cemetery, takes her by the house and back to the apartment. He takes her to see the Accountant. And then back to the apartment, They rifle all of her mother’s things and find all the paper they can find. Daydee starts to make a list. Winston bows out to leave trying to convince her to leave it all with the accountant to sort out when she leaves. Then he realizes she is not leaving.
He goes to the Lawyer with the Preacher to tell him that she is not leaving.
She has a list of all the properties in the morning. She throws up. (She knows she’s pregnant- this is where the reader finds out.)
Winston takes her out to the farm and the little property with the oil well. She wonders about the farm that her great grandmother owned. They drive by- its being farmed. And the big house- it’s a medical doctor’s office. Winston tells her what he knows. They go to the deserted house in town and break in because no one knows where the key is. There is evidence that people have been in the house.
Winston takes her with him to visit his Alzheimer wife in a nursing home.
She goes to see the lawyer –because he owns her great-grandmother’s farm now. Is told the story about the murder investigation – the lawyer represented her mother in the investigation of the murder of her father- in exchange for the land.
Winston lies to her about everything at this point.
She is awakened by a bomb thrown through her front window at midnight. Whore is written across the front of her apartment in red paint.
There is a death for the cemetery in the morning. She must figure out what to do. The Preacher helps her with the opening and closing of the grave. She digs through the cemetery records and realizes the “big” problems. She finds the removed gravestone that the widow couldn’t pay for. The napkins of records. The burial vaults sold that don’t exist. She goes to The Accountant for help. It turns out he is not gay as she originally thought, but a TV and married. She trades her indulgence of his fantasies for accounting help. Winston accidently visits and discovers that she is all accepting and begins, later to try to confess all of his sins to her.
She finds her real father living in the bushes by the small property, totally deranged.
She tells Winston about this and it blows the dam. He had killed the man that was buried in Daydee’s father’s grave. Because her mother wanted it and he was her mother’s lover. We learn about the junkie stuff etc.
Daydee tries moving her father into the open shed at the back of the cemetery, but he disappears again. He will not enter a building, so he can’t be brought inside anywhere.
Preacher is opening and closing graves for her. She finds him trying to remove the shovel off of her backhoe and realizes he is trying to make her dependant on him. She fires him.
In trying to practice with the back hoe, digging around on the back side of the cemetery, she digs up human skeletons. Finds artifact which implies that the dead person was Mexican.
She and Winston go to church where she meets the Preacher’s wife- who hates her on sight. Daydee’s told she doesn’t belong here. Winston is praying more and more, wants salvation for all of his bad deeds.
Lawyer and Preacher hassle him, try to scare him.
Daydee figures out that the Lawyer is using her deserted house for a way station for illegal farm workers coming down from Canada or going up to Canada.
Sheriff useless. Denies that anything is going on in town. Pick-up truck from the cemetery has the tires slashed.
Lawyer tries buying out Daydee. Offering lots of money if she’ll go away. She refuses.
Lawyer tries to put Winston up to killing Daydee. He refuses- they fight.
Lawyer and Preacher are chasing Winston to kill him- he runs to Daydee and they run to the cemetery where there is a shotgun. In the shoot-out at the cemetery, Daydee learns the truth about why they have been out to get her. (The three of them gang raped her in high school when Winston was Football Coach and Lawyer & Preacher were players- she was so stoned she has no memory of it. ) Her crazy father appears and distracts the lawyer or stops him and she kills the lawyer. The preacher runs away.
Sheriff called- wants to arrest Daydee since she shot the Lawyer. Winston confesses and is locked up instead.
Daydee’s water breaks at the end and goes to the little Paris clinic to have her baby- She finds her baby in the middle of the night.
She and baby return to the church. The Preacher does sermon badly. His wife is confused. She confronts The Preacher and tells him he needs to give the sheriff the facts. She leaves without telling anyone anything.
Something about the Preacher’s flock deserting him.
Winston confesses to everything. Tells the Sheriff all.
Daydee waiting with the baby at the bus station for the father of the child to arrive. He has been prison all this time. He was an alcoholic, but has tried to reform.
No Title yet, and these things never never ever turn out like they are imagined at the beginning.
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