When The Wind Blows: A Spruce Run Mystery

by Mark Mueller

  “I’m okay, Madge. My dignity will survive.”

  Maddy kissed him on the cheek. His face was still beet red.

  I looked at Ducky. His eyes were full of mirth, and he couldn’t hold it in any longer. He threw back his head and roared with laughter.

  I tried to keep a straight face but instead burst into giggles. I knew this was something that wouldn’t be soon forgotten.

  Harry Cassidy looked at his watch and then at Ducky, showing slight embarrassment from our laughter.

  “I think we’re done here, Mr. Duckworth. You’ve done your good deed, today.”

  Ducky stopped laughing and walked up to Hugo Wuhrer and held out his hand.

  “Good night, Mr. W.”

  “Good night, Detective. Thank you for helping me out.”

  “Thank you too, Mr. Duckworth,” Amanda Wuhrer said.

  “You’re welcome, ma’am,” Ducky said. “You take care, now.”

  “Thank you, Ducky,” Maddy said. “And you, too, Mr. Cassidy.”

  Harry saluted and turned on his heel. Ducky joined him and they walked away. I turned back to Maddy and her family. Maddy and I locked eyes for a moment. I turned away, knowing I’d break out in laughter again if I looked at her any longer. None of us spoke for a couple of moments.

  “What a way to start a reunion,” I said after I regained my composure.

  “I didn’t expect it to happen this way,” Maddy said.

  That’s for sure.

  “So, how are you Maddy?” I asked.

  “I’m doing all right, Mac.”

  “It’s good to see you again.”

  “You too.” She smiled slightly, but I sensed she was pulling away.

  “Will you watch the fireworks with us, Mac?” Amanda Wuhrer asked.

  I looked at Maddy. Her face was impassive.

  “Sure, I’d like that.” I knew I was taking a chance.

  Hugo Wuhrer pulled another lawn chair from his car and set it next to Maddy’s. He remained standing.

  Amanda Wuhrer whispered something to her husband and then took the little girl’s hand. She looked at Maddy. “I think you two have some catching up to do.”

  Maddy gaped at her mother, who held her gaze. I wondered what was communicating between them. Was she asking her mother to stay? Or was she telling her mother she didn’t want to be alone with me? I couldn’t tell.

  Maddy’s parents and the little girl walked away. Maddy sat on a lawn chair and pointed me to the one next to hers.

  I sat down. “Who is she?”

  “Who’s who?” Maddy asked.

  “The little girl. Who is she?”

  “Charlie.”

  “Okay. So who is Charlie?”

  Maddy hesitated. “She’s a relative.”

  “Peggy’s daughter?”

  Maddy glared at me.

  “Fine.” I sensed that she wanted to drop the subject.

  Neither of us spoke for several moments.

  “This isn’t how I wanted to do this,” Maddy said.

  I turned and watched the dance band for a moment. “Then why did you ask me to stay?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just that—” She trailed off.

  I’m not a rocket scientist, but I did know when an awkward moment had arrived at the party and put a lampshade on its head.

  “Do you want me to leave?”

  “No, not yet.”

  Another long silence.

  “Are you really sober, Mac?” she asked.

  “Yes I am, Maddy.”

  She considered her words before speaking again. “How long?”

  “Almost six years. I went to a recovery program a couple of weeks after you left me.”

  “Where at?”

  “The New York City Rescue Mission.”

  “I know of it. My church volunteers there.”

  “I haven’t had a drink since.”

  “You just stopped, simple as that?”

  “It’s not quite that simple. I completed a twelve-step program.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “You haven’t completed all the steps, yet.”

  “What are you talking about? I finished the program.”

  “Sure you did. Tell me about steps eight and nine of your high and mighty twelve-step program.”

  I sensed that the hurt she had suffered on my account was simmering just below her façade. And I knew I had to be careful with my words. “Um,” I said, “Step Eight is where we make a list of all persons we’ve harmed and become willing to make amends to them all.”

  “And Step Nine?”

  “Step Nine is where we make direct amends to such persons whenever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Maddy looked at me coldly. “Was I on your list?”

  I grimaced. “Um, yes you were.”

  “Then how come I haven’t heard from you in the past six years?”

  I turned away and winced. In an instant I felt complete disgust with myself. How could I tell her that during my time in recovery, she was the one person with whom I was most terrified of making amends? I had rationalized at the time that I would have hurt her further if I tried to contact her. I was wrong, but I did a terrific job of convincing myself that I was right. Self-preservation, or at least the idea of it, makes you do crazy things. And when you’re an alcoholic, your reasoning skills become very disjointed. I avoided her because I didn’t want to have to face the one person I had hurt the most; the person I was still in love with. I was a coward and I knew it.

  “If you recall,” I said, “the last time we saw each other you said you didn’t want to see me again.”

  “I see.”

  “I didn’t want to hurt you any more than I already did.”

  “How convenient for you.”

  “I’m serious, Maddy.”

  “Maybe I would have gotten hurt more, and maybe I wouldn’t have, Mac. You should have at least tried.”

  I didn’t know how to respond. How was I supposed to know what she wanted me to do? What was I, clairvoyant? No, I wasn’t. I’m a writer, not a mind reader. And this was a no-win situation. I was damned if I did, and I was damned because I didn’t. What was I supposed to do?

  I had backed myself into a corner and there was no way out. And I had no one to blame but myself.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I never wanted to be an alcoholic. I hadn’t planned to be one, either. I don’t know anyone who does. When I was in college, I wanted my life to look like an article from one of those glossy travel magazines. I was a writer, after all. I was the editor of my college newspaper, and I worked part-time during my summer vacations as an intern at the Essex Daily News, as well as at my dad’s automotive garage when I had the time. I was going to be a newspaper reporter and a successful novelist, and marry the girl of my dreams. I was going to be affluent, travel the world, live on the beach, and live happily ever after. Life was going to be good.

  But, it didn’t work out that way. Three and a half years after I graduated from Kean, I was out of money, out of a job, out of a place to live, and the girl of my dreams had broken up with me. So much for my life plans.

  My drinking had started, as far as I can recall, on Ducky’s eighteenth birthday when he decide to celebrate with a bottle of Jameson Irish Whiskey.

  At the time, the New Jersey drinking age was eighteen. Since Ducky’s birthday was a few months before mine, it wasn’t difficult for us to get whatever we wanted. I don’t know why we started drinking, other than that we had a tacit idea that drinking would make us more mature. We though it made us more adult, more cool.

  We drank the entire bottle of Jameson that day and neither one of us looked back.

  From the outset, I never drank in moderation. In fact, I don’t think there was a day in eight years where I didn’t get drunk. And more often than not, Ducky was with me, s
ip for sip.

  I was raised in a Christian home and was the eldest of two sons. Alcohol was never a problem in my home because my parents didn’t often drink.

  In school, I was very goal and achievement oriented. Like all aspiring writers, I craved recognition. Life was all about how I imagined others had viewed me. I didn’t make a major decision in adulthood without knowing the opinions of others.

  My drinking escalated in college. So did Ducky’s. Somehow, I kept up with the books, and I learned how to keep my drinking and academic lives separate. This came as no surprise, since I was quite adept at compartmentalizing different areas of my life.

  And alcohol was one of those compartments.

  My alcoholism’s progression slowed down after I had met Maddy. Did she have a positive influence on me? Of course she did. Did I keep my drinking hidden from her? For the most part, yes. But soon after graduation, my drinking accelerated at a breathtaking pace. It was like a switch in my head had been thrown.

  I secured a dream job as a reporter for the Ocean County Press, an award-winning newspaper in Point Pleasant, New Jersey, with a circulation of over two hundred thousand subscribers. I had arrived into the big-league.

  But, with a big-league paycheck came big-league pressure. We had to compete with the Essex Daily News, which was the largest daily in the state. I had to work day and night, seven days a week, and days off were infrequent. Story deadlines and scooping the Daily News were what motivated me at first. Becoming the best writer on staff and earning a Pulitzer Prize became my priority.

  The pressures put on me by my editors, as well as the pressures I had put upon myself, compelled me to seek whatever relief I could find in bottles of Jameson.

  It wasn’t long before I was on my way to moral and spiritual bankruptcy. What I mean by moral bankruptcy is that I would lie, con and manipulate at every turn to either expedite or to cover up my drinking. What I mean by spiritual bankruptcy is that I began to view myself as the known center of the universe—able to do what I wanted, when I wanted to do it, however unrealistic it may be.

  But when that didn’t work out, I blamed everyone else and drank even more. I’d lie awake, unable to sleep most nights, wondering whether the cycle would ever stop, but it never did. I was on the fast track to oblivion, and I couldn’t pass Go or collect two hundred dollars.

  Reality bit me on the butt when Maddy came over to my house one Saturday morning and said we needed to talk.

  And it wasn’t about the weather.

  I was in bed sleeping off another night of Jameson when the doorbell rang. I tried to ignore it and go back to sleep, but the bell kept going off like a 1950s air raid siren.

  Where were my mom and dad? Weren’t they home?

  No, I recalled. They were in Florida. I was home alone and the doorbell was blasting off. Then I realized that the door to the kitchen was open. No one in Spruce Run locked their doors at night. Everyone trusted everyone. In fact, the trust was so strong that when I parked in my driveway, I’d often just leave the keys in the ignition.

  I think that if I had locked the kitchen door the previous evening, Maddy would have given up. But, she knew the door wouldn’t be locked, and she came into the house, unannounced, and confronted me. She ordered me out of bed and said we needed to talk. And talk, she did. She was loaded for bear and taking no prisoners.

  Once she knew I wasn’t going to fall back to sleep, she told me to meet her at Mattoon’s in fifteen minutes. And then she turned on her heel and walked out.

  * * * *

  Twenty minutes later I was at Mattoon’s and experiencing the worst morning of my life. Maddy broke up with me, and in doing so she broke my heart. She said my drinking had killed our relationship, and that it was killing me, too. And she wanted no part of it. She was a rising star at WNMH Radio, an independent station in Morristown. She had her life to live and wasn’t about to let me keep her from living it.

  * * * *

  My life spiraled downward into Satan’s torment after that. A week and a half after Maddy gave me my walking papers, I was fired from the Ocean County Press, and couldn’t get another job after that. My editor had a big mouth, and my reputation in the industry had disintegrated as a result.

  Of course, I blamed him. I blamed everyone except the person who was responsible.

  Me.

  I continued to drink and put my problems on everybody’s shoulders but my own. Things got so bad that my parents told me I couldn’t live in their house anymore. And from there, I had nowhere to go, no one to turn to. My savings were gone. My credit card was maxed out. And I had sold my beloved Honda Civic to get cash.

  A few days after my parents had kicked me out of the house, I found myself at the church I had gone to all my life. I reasoned that I could sneak in and sleep overnight on one of the pews, and then sneak out early the next morning before anyone had noticed I had been there. I had been to Ducky’s house the night before, and he had let me crash on his couch just for one night. He and Debbie were having their own problems due to his drinking, and she didn’t want to have to deal with mine, either. Word gets around Spruce Run faster than you can say lightning, and Debbie already knew I was kicked out of my house, even before I had shown up at hers.

  When I awoke at daybreak from an uncomfortable and fretful night on the church pew, Father Rattigan greeted me. He had been waiting patiently in the pew behind me. He had also heard that my parents had thrown me out.

  Father Rattigan asked me what was going on, and what I was going to do. I tried to gloss over everything, but he was as perceptive as a laser. He knew my family. He had performed my parent’s wedding ceremony and had baptized both my brother and me. He knew me better than I wanted to admit, and he challenged me when he knew I wasn’t being truthful.

  I finally resigned myself to the situation and told him everything. I had nothing left to lose. As clichéd as it is to say it, I was at rock bottom. There’s no other way to describe it.

  I told Father Rattigan about how Ducky and I had started drinking on the sly when we were in high school. I told him about Maddy, and about the Ocean County Press, and about my parents kicking me out of the house. And I told him about how, without seeing it, my life had progressed down a spiral of no return.

  Farther Rattigan concentrated on listening to me, interrupting me only to clarify something I had said. When I had finished, he told me about a place where I could get help, called the New York City Rescue Mission.

  I was confused. Wasn’t the New York Mission a shelter for homeless people and gutter bums? Father Rattigan explained that the homeless shelter was just one of the services the Mission had offered. They also offered a nine-month recovery program for men who needed help with alcohol and drug addiction. And since I lost my job and no longer had health insurance, I didn’t have the luxury of going to an insurance-paid rehab program.

  The New York City Rescue Mission was a Christian-based, non-profit organization located on Lafayette Street in lower Manhattan that relied on donations from caring people. And as a result, its drug and alcohol recovery program was free of charge for people who didn’t have the finances to pay for help.

  I knew I needed help to get my life back on track. But did I want to spend nine months in a homeless shelter? My immediate reaction was that a program like that was beneath me. I was a college graduate, after all. But even though I was a college graduate, I had burned all of my bridges and didn’t have anyone else to turn to. Maybe I was a homeless gutter bum after all.

  So, in the end, I acquiesced and decided to go. Father Rattigan drove me to the Spruce Run bus station and purchased a Greyhound ticket for me, and three hours later I walked through the front door of the New York City Rescue Mission.

  By and large, my time at the Mission was a good experience. It was difficult, but not impossible. The most difficult part of my stay was drying out during the first month. Learning to live without the crutch of alcohol was more difficult than I could ever have imagined. Bu
t, I did it, and lived to tell about it. I lived in a dormitory-style room with twenty other men who were also in the program, and received a bed and three meals a day. I went to three 12-Step meetings and two Bible studies every week. An hour-long chapel service was conducted each evening, seven days a week. And I was given a daily four-hour work-therapy assignment as a receptionist at the Mission’s front lobby desk.

  When I graduated from the program nine months later, my parents invited me to come back home, no questions asked. They were just happy to have me home, and even more thankful that I wasn’t drinking anymore.

  Father Rattigan was just as delighted by my return home. He came to the house for dinner the night I had come home, and wanted to hear all about my stay at the Mission. My mom invited Ducky for dinner, too.

  During my time at the Mission, Ducky started going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and was now in his sixth month of sobriety. On a sad note, however, Ducky’s wife, Debbie, had filed for divorce about a month before he had started going to AA.

  As we got caught up with each other’s lives during dinner, everyone wanted to hear the details about my time at the Mission. I must have talked for an hour. Even my mom and dad seemed enraptured by my story.

  Life wasn’t utopia, but it was better than it had been a year before. Still, it was good to be home.

  * * * *

  About two weeks after I had returned home, I received a telephone call from Old Man Letts, the editor of the Spruce Run Bugler. He asked me to drop by his office. I assumed he had spoken with Father Rattigan and wanted to do a feature story on drug and alcohol recovery. So I made an appointment to see him the following afternoon. I wanted to tell my story. Besides, everyone knew me in Spruce Run and I wanted to set the record straight. I wanted to put my story out there before the gossip mill kicked into gear.

  When I arrived at the Bugler’s office, Old Man Letts’ waved me straight into his office, where he was waiting for me at his desk. It was good to see him again. Although I never worked for him, I had known him all my life because he was Harry Cassidy’s best friend.