A Fragment Too Far

by Dudley Lynch

  It was several seconds before she responded. “I don’t think you should assume that, but you could.”

  We were settling into a rhythm, so I took my time formulating my next question. “Could some other therapist in Flagler have helped them — or were you the only one?”

  I was expecting a quick reply, even if she couldn’t answer, but she seemed to struggle with the question. My respect for her was growing. She intended to be truthful within the bounds that her legal and ethical limits allowed. “Possibly.”

  “Possibly someone else could have helped them? Or possibly that you were the only one?

  “Possibly I was the only one.”

  “I assume that you’ve brought me this list because you are concerned that ill has befallen the people listed here.”

  She seemed a bit vexed at the question. Or maybe it was my wording. “Certainly, being found dead should be considered an ill that has befallen.”

  I apologized to her, as I should have. “Forgive me, I still sometimes lapse into divinity school speak.” I quickly added, “You’ve brought me this list because you think these individuals are dead?”

  “That’s my fear.”

  “And there’s nothing that they told you in your therapy sessions with them that might explain this?”

  Her face tightened. I could see that the tension within her was growing. My suspicion was that she wanted to answer the question in detail. But I knew what was coming. “I can’t answer that because it would violate their confidences.”

  “Do you think you have other clients whose lives may be in danger?”

  “I have reason to hope not.”

  “And what would that reason be?”

  I don’t think she had anticipated the question in quite this form. After all, the question went to the heart of what she had been trying to conceal. And yet it put no specific individual’s confidential information in jeopardy.

  She answered before her cautious side could prevent it. “I don’t have any other clients who knew Professor Huntgardner’s secret.”

  She was aghast at her professional error. Aghast and beaten at a game she’d trained for all her career. She reached for her purse and shoved her chair backwards with her legs so hard that it toppled over. And fled from my interrogation room.

  I had an acute interest in Professor Huntgardner’s secret. But what I needed at the earliest possible moment was evidence of Professor Huntgardner’s corporeality. There I went again. That was another divinity school word. But what word should I have used? His “realness.” His “extant-ness”? No, I liked “corporeality” best.

  Where was he?

  Full as my plate was, I was going to have to take the time to do what any good tracker does. Go to where the trail starts. And follow it until it ends or at least begins to yield results.

  I needed to see what Garrick Drasher at Pecan Mountain Nursing Home could tell me about Professor Huntgardner and hidden things.

  Chapter 29

  I’d asked Detective Coltrane to run point on Professor Huntgardner’s disappearance. Again, it was an intuitive call — one based on a hunch that productive information was going to be hard to come by. That’s to say, we were going to be running up against a lot of — to use Dr. Simpson-Mayes’s concept — zipped-lip-ness.

  Detective Coltrane had a low tolerance for zipped-lip-ness. The ex-military policeman made no apology for what he called his “bad puppy” style of investigation.

  The scrappy pup allusion fit him well. He could come across as a sweet, cuddly ball of fur one moment. But if he thought people were playing games with him, they could find him erupting like a pet dog shaking the stuffing out of its toy. The anger seemed genuine. He didn’t like being misled or ignored. And he could erupt at any time.

  I’d passed him in the hall earlier in the day and learned that he’d already had a couple of dust-ups with the nursing home staff.

  They’d started hiding behind “Mr. Drasher’s rules” instead of answering his questions. His suggestion was that I visit Drasher without him. But as I was preparing to leave the courthouse parking lot, he walked up to my patrol car. Knocked on the window. Slipped into my passenger seat. And briefed me on what he’d found so far.

  The vividness of his commentary surprised me. “The place is about as chaotic as a county fair midway on Saturday night. The mystery isn’t that they’d lose a client. The miracle is that they can keep track of any of them.”

  That information whetted my curiosity. “And the reason for that?”

  “Too much and too few. Too much going on, and too few personnel to make it work well. Nobody seems to know that much about running a nursing home that operates like a bazaar. You know that it’s more than an old-folks home, right?”

  “Yeah, I was out there the other night. Looked like a busy place.”

  “The seniors are getting short shrift, I know that.”

  “So where the professor’s disappearance is concerned, that tells us — what?”

  He started digging under his thumb nail with one of his upper incisors. It was a habit I’d long since learned to watch for because of what it signaled. Useful insights were on the way. Either that or an eruption.

  This time, though, it was neither. He shared his puzzlement.

  “From what I can tell, everything that happened with the professor the other morning was according to Hoyle. The floor attendant remembers wheeling him to a van. She showed me where she’d checked his name off on a floor roster they used in emergency evacuations. They had to check off a box when they took a resident out of their room and check another box when they were loaded for transport. And there was another box for when they were unloaded. The professor seems to have made it to the school gymnasium. But then they lost track of him.”

  “And what is your opinion of Pecan Mountain’s developer and manager?”

  “In a word?”

  “Sure.”

  “Cocky. Leaves you with the impression that anything you’d want to know about him or his operation is probably above your job description.”

  * * *

  At the nursing home, I got this same perception merely from watching Garrick Drasher walk toward me in the lobby. Only my one-word impression was different from my deputy’s.

  Hunk.

  Garrick Drasher might or might not be too complicated for Flagler’s laid-back atmosphere, but he was almost certainly too pretty. Lordy, this dude should have gone to Hollywood, not Flagler.

  Before we’d exchanged a single word, I was picturing him on a campaign poster. This was the exact kind of look I’d sought from my photographer. Rugged. Vigilant. Virile. Easy, confident smile. Perfect white teeth. The clean-shaven chin dimple, broad lips, broad cheeks, broad brow, broad cowlick, the right boyish flair to his whiskey-brown hair — he’d have turned heads on any street in America.

  His sartorial taste matched his physical features to a tee. Tan suit, perfectly fit. Light blue slim-fit dress shirt with a spread collar. Red-striped four-in-hand tie tucked inside his buttoned coat. U.S. flag lapel pin. Nothing missing or out of place. He gave me a once-over that seemed to leave him reassured. It involved a toe-to-head sweep of his eyes that was so practiced it was intended to go unnoticed. I felt it might be the missing eye that had triggered that, but I was probably being hypersensitive.

  His segue was a smooth as his haircut. “Let’s have coffee in the Oasis on the Prairie.”

  My agreement wasn’t necessary. He led the way. Chose us a table. Flashed two fingers at a waitress. And, not bothering to look my way once, raised both arms and gestured around the big room. “You’re probably wondering what all this is.”

  Garrick Drasher’s grin suggested I should be wondering that, whether or not I was. But I disappointed him. “No, actually, I was wondering if you could shed any light on Professor Huntgardner’s disappearance.”
/>   That worked. He looked straight at me for the first time without my thinking that he was looking through me. I was now an official participant in this conversation. “I’d certainly like to. I’m exceedingly fond of the old gent. But I can’t imagine what I could tell you that I haven’t already told your detective.”

  “About your chats?”

  “What chats are those?”

  I wasn’t here to be a straight man to his coyness. “Your chats with Dr. Huntgardner. All those talks about hidden things.”

  He recovered in an instant, but I knew from his double take that I was now being reevaluated. “Oh, you know about those?”

  I didn’t intend to admit to more than I knew. “Only that he liked to talk about hidden things.”

  “Well, actually, one of our consulting psychologists suggested it. The professor’s like most dementia sufferers — losing his working memory. Can’t hang onto information much at all in the short term.”

  “I experienced that in my brief visit with him.”

  I saw it again. People can’t control micro expressions of surprise in their face. Often, they are followed by signs of fear. But since I’d not been around Drasher enough to have developed a baseline, I couldn’t say for sure what I was seeing. But I could have suspicions. His retort was a nothing answer. “Oh, so you met him?”

  “‘Met’ is a bit strong, as you can imagine. But, yes, I paid him a brief visit the other evening.”

  “And you talked about hidden things?”

  “It was your receptionist who passed that information along. I don’t think she knew any more than that.”

  “Well, I like to take the professor things on my visits. Things I thought he’d be interested in. And hide them while he shielded his eyes. And he’d try to remember what they were.”

  “Do you think this is something his abductor or abductors might have known about?”

  “Ordinarily, I’d have said no. But then I wasn’t aware you knew about our little game either.”

  “What kinds of things did you hide?”

  Drasher shrugged and looked away. He seemed to be weighing how much he should reveal. But then he apparently decided to be transparent. “Piddling things. Like his door key.”

  “Door key?”

  “To his house.”

  “He has the door key to his house?

  “In his keepsake box — again, something the therapist suggested. And not long ago I gave him a piece of trinitite. You know what that is?”

  “From the Trinity blast.”

  “Yes, you probably know that Dr. Huntgardner lived about a hundred miles from the test site as a young lad. Just over the mountains. He saw the tremendous light from the explosion. Supposedly it changed his life. I thought that it might help him reconnect with something important. Something he’d be able to recall.”

  Trinitite was fused sand from the nuclear blast. No more than twenty-four hours ago, I’d looked out of curiosity to see if it could be purchased on the internet.

  It could be. A piece the size of my big toe was available from a minerals dealer in Telluride, Colorado, for $10 plus shipping.

  I put the question to Drasher. “You bought this on the internet, perhaps?”

  He tried to hide his impatience, but it showed in his eyes. “I’d carried it around for years. Bought it when I was stationed for a few weeks in New Mexico in the Air Force.”

  “You were in the Air Force before you came to Flagler?”

  “ISR Agency. Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency.”

  “And you came to Flagler because we are one of the business capitals of the world?”

  He laughed with what I’m sure he thought was appropriate mirth. “I spent a bunch of money on consultants before I decided that Flagler would be a good destination.”

  But I found myself paraphrasing Hamlet — the gentleman doth chuckle too much — and decided to press the issue, this time with a more pointed irony. “A good destination because we are badly in need of former Air Force intelligence agents here?”

  The chuckling was over. In fact, the interview was over. He stood up. Because my chair was on casters, he was able to push it around about thirty degrees with me still in it. Then he reached for me, half-lifting and half-tugging me out of the chair, indicating that we’d be moving elsewhere. “Bet you’d like to see his room.”

  “I can remove the crime scene tape, yes.”

  I thanked him for the coffee and told him I knew the way. This time, it was my turn to be imperious. Never looked back to see if he would try to follow.

  I was already wondering if I’d find the piece of trinitite among the professor’s belongings.

  I didn’t.

  I’d have considered my search of the room a waste if not for something else I found.

  It was in one of the dozen or so books arranged between book ends on a small chest of drawers near the head of the professor’s bed. The book was Fundamentals of Physics by Thaddeus Johans Huntgardner, PhD. The item that widened my eyes was a bookmark. At least, that appeared to be its current function.

  But not how it had begun its life.

  It was a receipt for two orders of fries, two large Cokes, and three Both Barrels Double Meat Cheeseburgers from the Eden Junction Bar and Grill.

  Chapter 30

  This time, I wanted to talk to Judson Mayes without his mother around. You could think of it as wanting a man-to-man discussion. But I was thinking of it as more an inquiring-mind-to-inquiring-mind kind of chat. One off the record.

  I’d tell him he wasn’t suspected of anything. And he wasn’t. Not anything illegal that I knew of.

  But every time I’d found myself in the company of this sharp-eyed, sharp-eared, sharp-witted young man, I’d been treated to unexpected information that had reordered my world in some way. Although in each instance, I’d left his presence feeling that he hadn’t told me everything he could and should have.

  I’d thought he wasn’t going to answer his phone. But he did on the sixth or seventh ring. Said he was sorry about that, but he couldn’t get his phone out of his pocket.

  When I asked where he was, he said out behind the Eden Junction Bar and Grill. I asked what he was doing. He said he was trying out the camera on his new mini-drone. I asked if some refreshment sounded good. He said he could meet me at the restaurant in five. I told him I’d need twenty. When I arrived, he was waiting in the parking lot in his sporty jeep.

  I wasn’t sure whether we should try sitting at a booth — didn’t know whether he could get in one. The first one we stopped at, he rejected, saying it was too small. So, I let him pick a booth. The one he chose accommodated him. But as he worked his way along the bench, it reminded me of a dog trying to squeeze through a fence hole.

  I wasn’t going to eat. But if he wanted another Both Barrels cheeseburger, or two, or three, in the middle of the afternoon, he could have them courtesy of the Abbot County sheriff.

  He ordered two. With caramelized onions. A large order of fries. And a jumbo Coke.

  I held up the receipt. “Found this in a book at the nursing home.”

  He reached for the slip of paper and rubbed it back and forth between his fingers. “Thermal paper. It’s what they use now in a lot of cash registers. It changes color when heat hits it. That’s what they have here. A cash register with a thermal printer.”

  “The date on it is Monday, a week ago.”

  He gave it a closer look. “Three burgers. I never order three. So if this is mine, I was with somebody.” He flicked the front of his chin with his forefinger a couple of times. “Yes, it probably is mine. I was here that day with Scottie.”

  “And you have a habit of saving your receipts?” It seemed unusual for a seventeen-year-old.

  “I have a habit of sticking them in my shirt pocket and forgetting about them. Mu
m hates to find them, especially if they go through the washing machine first. She thinks the receipts are dangerous. Something about high levels of bisphenol A in the thermal paper. Chemically, BPA is kind of like estrogen, you know.”

  I told him I didn’t know that. But that the receipt hadn’t interested me not because of what it was made of but because I’d not expected to find it in Professor Huntgardner’s room.

  “Oh, that.” He reached for another potato stick. “I’m trying to get into Harvard. Mum thinks volunteering at the nursing home will look good on my application.”

  “So you’ve been doing it for a while?”

  “Since school let out. I try to do it at least twice a week. Read to the old folks. Or chat. Sometimes play games. Or with the professor, just sit. He’s usually asleep. I’d probably not stay around when he’s napping, but I found that old physics textbook he wrote on his shelf. Pretty Gucci. Sitting there reading it with the author only a few feet away.”

  “Pretty Gucci?”

  He grinned and gave me a tolerant look. “That’s the new ‘cool.’ The new ‘awesome.’”

  Gucci, indeed. I hoped he got into Harvard. But that was a year off. I needed something now. I needed one of the brightest minds of Flagler’s current generation to wade with me once again into the deep waters of our community’s secrets. “You knew there was a bomb scare at Pecan Mountain before dawn Wednesday.”

  “Yeah, Mum told me about it. She wasn’t sure it was okay for me to do my volunteering thing Wednesday afternoon. She called, and they said it was okay to show up.”

  “You had to have done more than just shoot the bull with the oldsters or read Professor Huntgardner’s textbook on all those visits. What’s it like living at Pecan Mountain Nursing Home?”

  He didn’t need to think about it. “Like living in the last orphanage on the road to hell.”

  “You really mean that?”

  “Got a ‘for instance,’ for you. All those call buttons? The ones on the head board under the little sign that says, ‘Love without limits. Just push’? I pushed one for the professor on at least five visits. Every single time, instead of a nurse’s aide, somebody on the kitchen staff showed up — in a dirty apron. It’s all part of that whack job Drasher’s ‘be all the talent you are’ philosophy. Everybody has at least two or three jobs. The nursing aides also peel potatoes and mop the freaking floors.”