Saving Allegheny Green

by Lori Wilde

  Reaching over, I clicked on the floor lamp.

  Sissy squinted, raised her arm to block her eyes. “Hey, sergeant, cut the light, you’re blinding me!”

  “Where have you been?” I asked, trying not to sound like a nagging parent but failing miserably.

  She’d been drinking. I could tell by the too bright sheen in her eyes. Her mascara had smeared, causing her to look like a raccoon. “None of your beeswax.”

  “Very mature, Sistine. Want to tell me how you got those hickeys?”

  She wagged her tongue at me, showing off her gold stud. “Jealous?”

  “Were you with Rocky?” I asked, an awful feeling slithering through me.

  “What if I was?”

  “I thought you were finished with him.” My frustration knew no bounds. I wanted to throttle my sister for her stupidity and idly wondered if Conahegg would arrest me.

  The notion of Conahegg and handcuffs generated immediate sexual imagery. I’d love to cuff him to the headboard of my bed, strip him naked and trail a feather oh so slowly over his body. The thought of the strong, imposing sheriff completely within my power rocked me with a shudder that dove clean through my pelvis.

  “Rocky’s changed, Ally,” Sissy said, shattering my scorching daydreams and bringing me back to grim reality. In that instant I understood why Mama spent so much time in her fantasy world. It was fun.

  “Changed?” I blinked. Back to big-sister mode. Forget about Conahegg. Forget about handcuffs. Forget about bondage and feathers and orgasms.

  “He told me that getting shot in the toe gave him something to think about,” Sissy continued. “It made him realize how much he loves me.”

  “Excuse me?” I shook my head. The vestiges of my flights of fancy completely dispelled. “The man caused you to be beaten by a loan shark, Sistine Eileen Green. Have you forgotten about that? Your bruises haven’t even faded.”

  Sissy waved a hand. “It was a misunderstanding.”

  “Stop!” I held up a palm. I couldn’t absorb anymore. Sissy back in Rocky’s arms. “What about his wife, Darlene?”

  “He’s divorcing her, then we’re going to Vegas to get married.”

  “Sissy, don’t let him play you for a fool.”

  “Can’t you be happy for me?”

  “Sit down.” I rubbed my face with my hand. “I have something to tell you.”

  “Don’t start ragging on me, Ally.”

  “Sissy, this is important.” I pointed at the sofa. “Sit.”

  “Screw you, you’re not my mother.”

  “I’ve got bad news and it has nothing to do with Rocky. Please, have a seat.”

  “Let me guess,” Sissy sneered. “You got passed over at work for employee of the month.”

  I’d meant to tell her about Tim in a delicate manner but my self-destructive sister was making diplomacy impossible. “Tim Kehaul is dead,” I said bluntly.

  Sissy blinked at me as if she hadn’t heard me.

  “Your ex-boyfriend committed suicide.”

  Then just like that, her knees buckled and she crumpled to the carpet. Dang. Hadn’t I told her to sit down?

  I leaped from the rocker, ran to her side and braced her with my arm. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Tim?” She whimpered. “Dead?”

  “It was an accident.”

  Sissy frowned. “But I thought you said he committed suicide.”

  “He did. Except not on purpose.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  I explained what had probably happened and Sissy began to cry.

  “Shh,” I soothed, brushing her hair with my fingers. “It’s all right. Shh.”

  “Poor Tim.” She sobbed.

  “I know.”

  Her shoulders shook and she leaned against me.

  “You were with Rocky, right? Didn’t you see the patrol cars at Tim’s place?”

  “I met Rocky at Zydeco’s,” Sissy said, referring to a trashy country-and-western bar located at the Parker County line in an area known as Whisky Corners, which consisted of Zydeco’s, a strip club called Tits-a-Poppin’, a Majestic liquor store, a bingo hall frequented by the blue hair set, a massage parlor professing to specialize in Rolfing and three cut-rate gas stations renowned for watering down their petrol.

  “What was he doing out of the house?” I asked. “He’s supposed to be recuperating.”

  “He had cabin fever.”

  “Please, tell me you’re not serious about marrying Rocky,” I begged.

  “Well…”

  “Think of Denny.” I clasped her hand. “Think of yourself. You could do so much better, Sissy. Don’t sell yourself short.”

  “Rocky says he’s got a surefire way to make a lot of money,” Sissy blurted.

  “Even if it’s true, there’s more to life than money, Sis. What about love?”

  “What about it?”

  “Do you love Rocky? Does Rocky love you?”

  She shrugged. “I loved Tim and look what happened.” The mention of his name brought fresh tears. “No one ever treated me as good as he did. Then he turned gay on me!”

  “Tim didn’t turn gay, Sissy. He was always gay. He just happened to come out of the closet while he was dating you.” I took a deep breath. Analyzing my sister’s choices was beyond my expertise. She needed professional help. “It’s late and we’re both tired. Why don’t we talk tomorrow?”

  Sissy nodded and I helped her to her feet.

  “I do know of one young man who loves you very much, Sissy.”

  “Who’s that?” She looked at me expectantly, eyes wide. The sad thing was, she didn’t even realize who I was speaking of.

  “Your son.”

  THE NEXT MORNING I hit the gym before work, tackling the StairMaster to relieve some of my frustration over Sissy. An hour later, exhilarated with exhaustion, I started for the showers only to stop in my tracks as I passed the weight room.

  There, in all his half-clothed glory, was Conahegg hefting barbells over his head.

  Like a kid drawn to a cheap carnival ride, I sidled over to him. “Hi. Hello. I didn’t know you came here.”

  Conahegg simply grunted and lowered the weights. He inhaled, then exhaled. “Hey,” he finally said.

  I couldn’t seem to stop my gaze from skittering out of my control and attacking him. He wore a red muscle shirt and black cotton shorts. I think he had on Nike runners but to tell the truth I didn’t pay much attention to his feet.

  There was not an ounce of fat anywhere on his body. And his forearms! God, what forearms. There ought to be a law against such perfection.

  I wanted him. With a physical hunger unlike anything I’d ever known. My hormones must have been out of whack. Estrogen overload. That had to be the answer. By nature, I was not a lusty gal. I did not drool over movie stars or gaze longingly at the backsides of handsome construction workers. I did not throb for romance novel heroes nor did I daydream of riding rugged cowboys.

  But there was something about Conahegg that floated my sexual boat. And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to deny my obsession.

  You’re a sick, sick puppy, Allegheny Green.

  It’s okay. It’s all right. No harm in fantasizing. As long as he doesn’t know how you feel, everything is hunky-dory.

  But if I didn’t put my eyes back in my head soon he was going to figure out my secret.

  His gaze flicked over me. Steady. Controlled. Yet deep inside those gray depths I saw something else. Something that wasn’t the least bit steady or controlled. Something primal, something elemental. Something that made my toes curl.

  “Well,” I said awkwardly, flapping my white towel around like a flag of surrender. “I saw you here and wanted to come over and say hi.”

  Inwardly, I cringed. How inane!

  He smiled. Just the tiniest bit. “Hi.”

  “Didn’t mean to interrupt your workout.” I was shifting my weight, nervous as a grasshopper in a pen full of chickens. “You have fun.�
�

  One corner of his mouth lifted a little higher.

  “I better be going. See ya. Bye.”

  Then I zoomed away.

  If someone had asked me to take a ride on the space shuttle leaving for Mars, I would have jumped at the chance. Instead, I threw myself into the shower and blasted the cold water.

  Take that, you oversexed ninny.

  A few minutes later I changed into my scrubs and sneaked out the back door of the gym, desperate to avoid Conahegg.

  I stopped by McDonald’s for coffee and a breakfast burrito to help calm me down before heading to my first appointment.

  By seven-thirty, it was already hotter than the day before and I ended up turning on my air-conditioning along with the morning show on Q102. I took farm road 413 off highway 51 and drove past rolling ranch land to a small frame farmhouse dropped in the middle of ten acres, eight miles out of town.

  Miss Maddie Farnsworth was my favorite patient. She’d once been my fourth grade homeroom teacher. She should have sold her house and moved into Cloverleaf long ago but Maddie had her own way of doing things.

  She’d come to need my services by way of a fractured hip and a nasty nosocomial infection. She’d been released from the rehab hospital two weeks earlier and had been healing nicely but still had to receive antibiotics to stem the tide of methicillin-resistant staph aureus circulating in her blood.

  Because she’d never married and had no children, Maddie lived alone, but she was never lonely. An obsessively cheerful woman, she’d spent forty-five years in the Cloverleaf school system. She knew everyone in town and everyone knew her. Her former students, members of her church and other friends dropped by on a daily basis to keep Maddie informed on current events in Cloverleaf. Plus, she had an addiction to the telephone, which she happened to be on when I arrived.

  I knocked on the door, announced myself and walked on in.

  Maddie beamed and waved at me from her wheelchair. “Gotta go, Evie, my favorite nurse is here. Call me back in an hour.” She switched off her cordless phone and rested it in her lap. “Good morning, sunshine,” she welcomed.

  Sharp blue eyes peered at me. She hadn’t changed much over the years. A little thinner, her shoulders a little more stooped but she still possessed a quick wit and a keen mind.

  I smiled. “Morning, Maddie.”

  She’d been a strict but fair teacher and I’d long ago forgiven her for making me stand at the front of the class with gum stuck on the end of my nose. I’d violated one of her ten commandments. Thou shall not chew gum in Maddie Farnsworth’s class. The consequences of ignoring the rule were a humiliating experience but she had broken my gum habit.

  “You look tired,” she announced. “Francie dropped by with poppy seed muffins and a pot of green tea. Would you like for me to heat you a cup in the microwave?”

  “No, thanks, I just finished my coffee.”

  “Coffee? Honey, that stuff revs you up. You need to calm down.”

  Calm down? Could she tell my pulse was still racing from my encounter with Conahegg? How? Did I have that “I wanna get laid” look about me?

  “I need revving up,” I lied. Anything to dispel the notion that Conahegg had done anything to increase my core body temperature.

  “Pah! You’re too young to be tired.”

  “I had a rough day yesterday,” I murmured, suddenly realizing I needed a little sympathy, a little mothering. Something I rarely got at home.

  “I heard.” Maddie clicked her tongue. “So sad about young Tim Kehaul.”

  “You know about that?” I arched an eyebrow. She never ceased to amaze me.

  Maddie nodded. “I even know you were the one to find his body. Can’t hide anything from me.”

  That was true. She knew everything about everybody in Cloverleaf and the surrounding area.

  I sat on the couch beside her wheelchair, opened my bag and began to remove the medical supplies. Syringes, heavy-duty antibiotic ointment, gauze, a vial of vancomycin, alcohol preps, Betadine wash, sterile drapes, IV tubing, normal saline.

  Maddie had zero veins, so instead of dismissing her with a saline well as they normally did, the hospital had put in a subclavian catheter. It was my job to keep a hawk eye on the insertion site for any signs of an infection developing there.

  “I knew that boy was headed for trouble,” Maddie sighed.

  “You did?”

  She unbuttoned the top button on her lace blouse and I spread out the drape under the subclavian catheter sewed into her neck vein. I’d never seen Maddie in a nightgown. She was always up and dressed whenever I arrived, her hair combed, her lipstick on.

  “He had such a gambling problem.” Maddie shook her head.

  “He did?” News to me. “We’re still talking about Tim?”

  She nodded. “I imagine that’s why he hung himself, poor boy—got so far into debt he couldn’t get out.”

  I didn’t tell her about the autoerotic asphyxiation theory. She was seventy and I didn’t want to shock her.

  “He really got bad after they legalized horse racing in Texas. Before that he was limited to driving to Shreveport or his annual trip to Las Vegas.”

  “How do you know?” I asked, as I prepared her subclavian catheter for the treatment.

  “I have my sources,” she said cagily. “And I remember all you kids. None of us changes much. Tim always liked to take a gamble. So did your sister, Sistine. You always played it safe. Quiet, calm, serious.”

  “What about the time I chewed bubble gum in your class? That wasn’t playing it safe,” I said, grasping at straws as it dawned on me that Maddie was right. I had been dull my entire life.

  She smiled. “Well, there is a spot of rebel deep down inside you.”

  I beamed. It’s pathetic, I know. I wanted to cling to the hope that yes, I could be wild if given the opportunity. Then I surprised myself by asking, “Did you ever have Sam Conahegg as a student?”

  “You know Sam?”

  I could have bitten my tongue off. Why couldn’t I stop thinking about him? It wasn’t as if I didn’t have enough stuff to worry about.

  “We recently met. I barely remember him from high school. He was a senior when I was a freshman.” And he’d been the son of one of Cloverleaf’s prominent citizens, while I’d been the girl with the kooky family from the wrong side of the river. I’d known from the beginning that Sam Conahegg was out of my league.

  Maddie nodded. “He graduated valedictorian. Did you know that?”

  “I’d forgotten.”

  “Hard worker. And one of the brightest pupils I ever had the pleasure of teaching,” Maddie mused. “But things weren’t easy for Sam.”

  “What?” I pricked up my ears. Do tell.

  “Sad.” Maddie clicked her tongue.

  “In what way?”

  “Lew Conahegg was a drunk. Used to beat the boy. You didn’t know that?”

  I shook my head.

  “Oh yeah. Lew hid his dark side from the public, but he showed it to his family. His wife, Sally, Sam’s mother, was pitiful. She bent over backward trying to please Lew. Course nothing she did suited him. What do they call it? Codependent?” She stopped to haul in a breath. “Sally smothered poor Sam. Always fussing over him. When he was in my fourth grade class she sent a note forbidding him to go outside in the winter, even on pretty days. She packed his lunch with crazy health food—tofu and brown rice and organic vegetables—long before it was popular. She walked him to school every morning, was there every evening to pick him up.”

  Ah, so that explained why Sam had left Cloverleaf, joined the Marines and never looked back. He’d been trying to escape. So why had he come home?

  “He’s another one with a responsibility complex,” Maddie said. “You two are peas in a pod.”

  “What do you mean by a responsibility complex?” I frowned.

  She waved a hand. “Don’t take it the wrong way, Ally. You both have this need to take care of things. To be in control. Ther
e are worse flaws. But because of your like temperament you two wouldn’t make a good match.”

  “Who said anything about us making a match?”

  Maddie’s eyes twinkled. “Sam’s got his hands full as it is.”

  “What do you mean?” I added the vancomycin to the small bag of saline solution and hooked it into Maddie’s catheter.

  “Big problems in the sheriff’s department.”

  “Oh, that leftover stuff from Sheriff Jameson’s administration.”

  “Yes and more.”

  “More?”

  “Trouble’s brewing.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  Maddie shrugged. “I’ve heard rumors that someone in his department is selling the drugs they confiscate from drug busts.”

  “You’re kidding?” I stared at her.

  “It’s only a rumor, mind. But it’s going to destroy Sam’s run as sheriff if he doesn’t find out who’s behind the thefts and put a stop to it.”

  “Maybe he should ask you who’s doing it,” I said.

  Maddie grinned. “How would I know that?”

  I started Maddie’s IV drip. After that, I checked her blood pressure and pulse, then had her turn to one side so I could change the surgical dressing on her hip.

  “Goodness,” she said. “It’s nine o’clock. Time for my program. Would you hand me the remote, dear?”

  I gave her the television remote control and sat down on the sofa to wait for her IV to finish.

  She snapped on the television set and turned it to the Religious Channel. “I missed his Sunday broadcast,” she said. “But they repeat it on Wednesday mornings at nine.”

  “Who?”

  “Why the Reverend Swiggly, of course.”

  “You watch his program?”

  “Oh, my yes! Ever since I broke my hip and haven’t been able to attend local services. Have you ever seen him? He’s so full of fire and emotion. I was tickled pink when I heard he was building a summer house on the river.”

  “Right next door to me,” I mumbled.