What Are Friends For?

by Patricia McLinn

“I can’t imagine I’ll need her full time, Chief. Especially—” Zeke shot her a glance of triumph “—when I’m working.”

  “Fine. When you’re not occupied with Mr. Zeekowsky, call in for assignments. Otherwise, make sure nothing else goes wrong until he leaves Drago.”

  Zeke looked up from his handheld only when Darcie got back in and closed her car door with a decided “thunk.”

  Maybe he was a tech genius, because apparently thumping it yesterday had fixed the thing. He’d had his nose buried in it ever since she’d picked him up this morning. Day Two of indebted servitude to Anton Zeekowsky.

  Only she wasn’t indebted, not yet. She just wanted to be. Wanted the whole town to be.

  She’d announced she had errands to run before they went to the Community Center for more queen candidates interviews. He’d said fine and whipped out the annoying little gadget and completely disengaged from his surroundings—her and Drago.

  He’d turned down her suggestion that he accompany her at each stop with little more than a grunt. In fact, all he’d given her was a symphony of grunts. Satisfied grunts, exasperated grunts, intrigued grunts and impatient grunts, all aroused by his intense interaction with his handheld.

  Now, he looked up as if surprised to find her beside him. He leaned forward to peer out the windshield at laden branches of blooms.

  “Lilacs,” he said as if he’d made a discovery.

  “That tends to be what you find at Lilac Commons. The park with all the lilacs that have made Drago famous, that bring visitors in from all over. Remember?”

  “You said you were going into the library.”

  “Zeke, with all the time you spent in this library, you had to have noticed that a park surrounds it. For heaven’s sake, you can’t get inside the library without walking a gauntlet of lilacs.”

  “Oh, yeah. You could smell them in the spring. April,” he added.

  She shook her head. “Peak’s in May. In the two-and-a-half minutes we have of real spring.” She was talking mostly to keep him from sinking back into the world where she couldn’t reach him. “I never understood why people rhapsodized about spring until I went to Charleston, South Carolina. The azaleas and the dogwoods…wow. We have great summers and falls, and winter can be beautiful, along with testing your mettle so you don’t become a weather wimp. But spring—it’s like three months in a mud pack.”

  “You mean ‘April is the cruelest month’? You recited that poem in Mrs. Edwards’s English class at the end of junior year.”

  “How on earth do you remember that?”

  “You kidding? You practiced it every day for a month in chem lab. All that stuff about lilacs and hyacinths and dead people? Something that creepy’s hard to forget.”

  She laughed. “And I only did the first part. There were four more sections to The Waste Land.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  She laughed again, no longer irked at him. Maybe because the handheld rested unnoticed in his big hands while he looked around Main Street.

  She slowed the car, but not enough to draw attention to the fact that they were passing what used to be his father’s shoe repair shop. When Mr. Zeekowsky had been alive, there had been a bench next to the front door where anyone was welcomed to rest awhile, and sometimes, after closing, the shop owner sat and exchanged greetings with passersby.

  One of her earliest memories was standing on tiptoe at Mr. Zeekowsky’s counter, fingers curled around the wooden edge, trying to pull herself up to see what produced the rich earthy smells she now knew as leather and saddle soap, and the creased, gentle smile of the man behind the counter as he handed her a section of orange from his lunch.

  Now, the narrow shop was among several that were boarded up.

  “This town doesn’t look too good,” Zeke said dispassionately.

  Irked came back in a flash. She resisted the urge to hit him over the head or to ask him if he’d had his eyes closed since he’d returned.

  He didn’t seem to notice her struggle. “Didn’t the town used to get all spruced up for the Lilac Festival?”

  “Yes.”

  “Skipped this year, huh?”

  “No. That’s why there are murals on the boarded up windows of businesses here on Main Street.” Josh Kincannon, the high school principal, had come up with the idea as an art class project and Ted Warinke had donated the paint and brushes. A win-win situation—the festival had free labor for masking gaping plywood eyesores and the art classes had materials provided, stretching their emaciated budget a little.

  He grunted. “The flowers look different.”

  She stopped to let Mrs. Richards cross the street with her walker and looked at the square concrete planters marching down wide sidewalks. In their heyday they’d held a profusion of blooms from May to October. Over the years some had succumbed to the freeze-thaw cycle of Illinois weather. Last year, they’d consolidated them, so four blocks at the center of town didn’t look gap toothed.

  What a project that had been. But the town had rallied around. That’s what Drago did. Rallied around, despite fewer and fewer resources.

  “The flowers don’t all match,” she said. Now that Mrs. Richards was safely on the sidewalk, Darcie pulled to the curb and lowered the window.

  “’Morning, Mrs. Richards. On your way to the library?” The old woman wore a down vest over her sweater.

  “Good morning, Darcie. Yes, for some reading.” She peered into the car.

  “Mrs. Richards, this is Zeke Zeekowsky, Guest of Honor for the Lilac Festival. Zeke, this is Mrs. Richards.”

  “Hello, Mrs. Richards.”

  “Hello, young man. It’s a pleasure to meet you, after hearing so much about you from your mother. Of course, I knew your father, too. Wonderful man, wonderful.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Mention of his father always seemed to expose that bruised look in Zeke’s eyes.

  “We need to get going, Mrs. Richards,” Darcie said. “Just wanted to say hello.” She drove a block before stopping to jot a note on her unofficial pad.

  “What are you writing?” Zeke asked.

  “A reminder to myself about Mrs. Richards. She’s going to the library to spend the day because her house is cold. I need to check that she hasn’t turned her heat so low that it’s dangerous, or worse, that it’s been turned off for nonpayment. That happened the winter before last.”

  “Good God. Why don’t people help her?”

  Again, she wanted to hit him. The metal form-holder would make a nice satisfying sound against his thick skull.

  “It isn’t that people wouldn’t help her. Last time the church council came through, but she refuses to let anyone know when she needs help.”

  That’s how Drago itself was—refusing to acknowledge it needed help. So, after a series of intense talks interspersed with research into available resources, she and Jennifer had formed an ad hoc committee of two to Do Something About Drago. The sole item on their agenda sat beside her.

  So maybe she better not hit him.

  “Now the church council is hurting for funds. All the groups who help people are about wiped out. Ted Warinke’s donated a lot, but business is starting to hurt at his hardware stores, too, so I don’t know how much longer he’ll be able to help.”

  She sensed a downgrade in his mood. So, before he could get defensive or—worse—dismissive, she added, “The town used to plant purple and white pansies.”

  “What?”

  “You said the flowers looked different. That’s because the town used to plant pansies, then tulips, followed by petunias. Neither the town nor the Lilac Festival Committee could afford them the past few years. So volunteers grow them from seed indoors. Only this year we had a late frost and they had to fill in with whatever they could get.”

  “Huh.” This grunt indicated either absorption in what she was saying or absolute lack of interest.

  Oh, hell, she couldn’t sit here guessing, and she couldn’t wait forever to start the pitch.

&n
bsp; “This town’s struggling, Zeke. Small farmers were the reason Drago started, and they’ve been its backbone for a long time, but small farmers are fighting the tide of agribusiness giants. The economic downturn hit Drago a second blow. It about brought this area to its knees.”

  She turned right on Hickory.

  “Drago hasn’t given up. What it needs most are ways to join in the new economy—not letting go of its farming roots, but supplementing them. Something that can coexist with farming.”

  “Darcie.”

  “What?”

  “According to that schedule you gave Ma and she’s been drumming into me, we’ll be late unless we get to the Community Center in four minutes.”

  “Warren,” Darcie said under her breath, as if in answer to something she’d been mulling.

  “Who?” The idea for the handheld that had come to him had potential but needed to perk, so he’d resurfaced to find they were at the Community Center. And Darcie wasn’t talking about Drago’s economy anymore.

  “Warren Wellton,” she said.

  Zeke followed her gaze as she cruised for a parking spot. It was that kid helping with the festival. “What about him?”

  “I was wondering how Ashley and Warren knew you were at the police station that first night. Cristina was the instigator to get them to go there, but how did she know? That’s the interesting question.”

  Not especially interesting to him, but he’d play along. “So you think he found out somehow as a favor to his sister?”

  “Nope. He did it to impress Ashley,” she said immediately.

  Zeke watched the kid go inside. This was getting complicated. He tried another tack. “What makes you think he’d be able to find out I was at the police station?”

  “Because he reminds me of you.”

  “Me? He’s a fireplug and I’m a beanpole.”

  “Not anymore—but I’m not talking about appearance. I’m talking about what goes on in your heads. He’s shown a lot of aptitude. He rigged Benny’s radio and played havoc with the middle school’s computers last year. I also suspect he’s behind Mildred Magnus’s conviction that she’s seen ghosts. Warren is too smart and too bored for his own good, just like you were. It’s why he gets in trouble.”

  “I never got into trouble.”

  “You never got caught.”

  He nearly smiled. Darcie knew things nobody else did.

  “Maybe you were too smart for Drago’s police then.” She clearly didn’t consider him too smart for at least one current member of the department. “You left in the nick of time before that restlessness in you exploded.”

  His eyes cut to her. He hadn’t left before another kind of explosion. The kind when two sets of adolescent hormones combine and ignite a reaction he would never forget.

  “But you’re back,” she added with an odd brightness. “And you have the chance to change what didn’t happen back then.”

  “Like what?” he asked cautiously.

  She laughed. Not her usual laugh. “Oh, c’mon, Zeke. This is your old pal, Darcie. I knew all your ambitions in high school. All your ambitions.”

  He’d been thinking she knew things about him no one else did, now it seemed she might know things about him he didn’t know.

  He’d wanted to get out of Drago and that had been no secret. Neither had his ambitions. So what was she talking about?

  The swell of voices and commotion at the doorway announced the arrival of the horde. He looked over his shoulder. From the midst of the group Jennifer gave him a rueful smile.

  He turned back to Darcie. She was watching him.

  “What?”

  She opened her mouth then closed it. “Nothing more than what I said. I knew all your ambitions.”

  “I have to make a couple stops before I take you home.”

  “To my mother’s,” he muttered reflexively.

  He wasn’t particularly surprised by Darcie’s announcement. Detours had become her MO. The first two days she’d picked him up early at Ma’s, then discovered errands she just had to run before they arrived at the Community Center. He’d tolerated stopping at the library, driving past empty buildings, visiting with clergy expressing concern over the community emergency fund’s diminishing balance and detouring to a grade school that needed painting. Yesterday she’d managed to “need” to stop at Yolanda Wellton’s beauty salon, which was a converted garage on the back of her house that sat practically atop the highway out of town.

  For once, Darcie hadn’t invited him to come in with her. That didn’t mean he’d been spared.

  About a minute after she’d gone inside, she and Yolanda emerged. From the look Darcie shot at the car, he’d guessed she’d decided that having this talk in front of him was preferable to having it in front of whoever was inside.

  Yolanda had dark circles under her eyes and slashes of red across her cheeks and nose that created a startling contrast to the rest of her pallor.

  Darcie handed the older woman a purse, talking sternly. Yolanda tucked it under her arm, wrapping her loose sweater around herself. Without looking at Darcie, she nodded, but even Zeke could see she didn’t mean it.

  He’d looked away, and caught the twitch of the curtain at a window in the flimsy connector between the house and salon—the kid, Warren. There’d been something said that first night at the police station, something about his mother driving Warren and Ashley there and that she’d been okay—what had that meant? And where was the kid’s father?

  It was that moment—the moment of finding himself wondering about family situations that he usually had no trouble shutting out—that Zeke had made his decision.

  This morning, when Darcie would have hustled him out of Ma’s kitchen for a round of her Social Services Tour of Drago, Zeke had declared he needed to make a business call, then kept it going—despite Vanessa’s efforts to wrap it up—until five minutes before they were due at the Community Center.

  Now, Darcie just had to do something before dropping him back at Ma’s. Tomorrow he’d schedule phone calls before and after his festival duties.

  Except this time she’d brought him to a residential part of Drago that didn’t look as if it were suffering.

  The area seemed familiar, though he hadn’t had cause to be in this part of Drago when he’d been growing up.

  Darcie braked behind an unwieldy truck trying to back into a narrow drive between a wall and garden. She drummed her fingers on the wheel.

  “If you’re in a hurry, go around the delivery truck,” he proposed.

  “I’m afraid it’s picking up, not delivering.” That sounded strained, but her next words sounded more like her usual tart self. “It’s your time I was concerned about. No doubt you want to get to your mother’s to work.”

  “No problem. Relax.”

  She put the car in neutral and stopped the finger drumming.

  He looked out his window. A soft yellow house sat well back from the street. A planting of tall maple trees with landscaped bushes and what he suspected would be blooming flowers during the summer divided the front yard from the street. The drive was a backward h, with the straight line connecting to a garage set well behind the house, and the hump of the h curving up to the front porch before returning to the street.

  The porch’s broad steps led to a glossy door set in an arch of glass. Fanlight and sidelights—he remembered from the months when he’d looked for a house and Brenda had insisted he know things like that.

  “This is nice,” he said.

  “Thanks. So what’s your house like?”

  Her response clicked on the light for him. This was her house—that’s why the area was familiar. He hadn’t been here often, and that last time, that night after they’d made love, God knows he hadn’t been taking in landscaping and architecture.

  “Zeke?” she prompted. “Your house?”

  House. Right… Only at this moment all he could recall was his office.

  He should have tried harder to get Brenda t
o select the house for him. He suddenly thought he would have liked a front door like this one.

  “It has a three-car garage,” he said with something akin to triumph. Then he saw her expression and the triumph faded.

  “There’s a porch.” Which he seldom used, because he was seldom home when it was daylight, and what was the point if you couldn’t see what was around you? “A lot of trees, especially down by the creek at the back of the property. Uh, bushes that bloom in the spring. Pink. And white.”

  “Azaleas, maybe?” He’d never understood how she did that. She was laughing at him, no doubt about it, yet it didn’t remind him why he generally preferred machines, software and theory to human beings.

  “Yeah, that sounds right,” he said with a half grin. “The best thing is I can turn the TV screens in the den or my bedroom into giant computer monitors. So I can work from bed if I get an idea during the night.”

  “I bet your overnight guests love that feature.”

  He almost said that his rare overnight guests had their own rooms, then he realized she meant women. As in women who shared his bed. The urge to tell her how few of those there had been bubbled in his chest.

  “Like It Or Lump It—that’s my motto,” he said instead.

  She grimaced. “Mister Chivalry, aren’t you.”

  “How about you?” he heard coming out of his mouth. “Any overnight guests? I mean guys. Anybody serious?”

  “Now? No.”

  “Ever?”

  “I was engaged at the end of college.”

  A sensation gripped him like that time he’d lived on chili for five weeks because all his money was going into starting up the company.

  “At last,” she added as the truck cleared the street.

  “What happened?”

  “He didn’t approve of my wanting to be in law enforcement. If I insisted on dealing with the criminal element, I really should be a lawyer.” From the prissy tone, he disliked the unknown guy even more.

  She negotiated the turn into the drive with easy familiarity. “And,” she added with the air of a knockout blow, “he refused to settle in Drago.”

  Now that Zeke didn’t hold against the unknown fiancé.