She perked up. “Oh, that’s alright. Mom says you’re a nice person.”
I chuckled. “You believe everything your mom tells you?”
Lindsay rolled her eyes. “Of course not everything.”
That made me laugh out loud.
Jasia said, “Thanks for the vote of confidence, sweetheart. I’ve got some pastries warming in the oven. Talk to Mr. Pierce.” She glided into the kitchen.
“What grade are you in, Lindsay?”
She squinted at me. “I’m in fifth. I should be in sixth, but my birthday is November. I’m older than most kids in my class.”
I nodded. “Probably smarter, too, if you’re like your mom.”
She grinned. “I don’t think I’m smarter. But, I like to draw.” She plopped down on the other side of the table and started digging into the hidden cubbies.
It was remarkable how much she resembled Jasia in miniature. Even her precision gestures mimicked her mother.
Lindsay slapped a pad of drawing paper in front of me with a very well-rendered horse sketched on it.
“Wow!” I touched it to verify it really was a drawing. “You drew that?”
“Yeah. I like horses. Someday I’m getting a horse.”
“Lindsay, stop making yourself promises your mother can’t keep,” Jasia hollered from the kitchen.
“She’s getting me one for my next birthday,” Lindsay whispered across the table. A pencil had appeared in her hand and she started lining in a new horse beside the first one.
Jasia returned carrying a plate of sweet-smelling pastries.
“Blueberry?” I asked.
She placed them in the center of the table. “Move your drawing for now, Sweetie. And Mr. Tucker told you to use the easel. I had to find a real art teacher to refine her talent,” Jasia told me. “They’re okay at the school, but they didn’t have time, or the inclination, to focus Lindsay’s excessive energy.”
“She’s amazing,” I said.
“I’m taking this to my room,” Lindsay said, standing up. “Adults like to talk about you like you’re invisible.”
I snickered.
Jasia wrinkled her nose. “She is such a critic.”
I lifted one warm turnover and leaned back, chomping into it. A flood of rich blueberry and sweet glaze rushed in. My saliva glands swelled and I had to stop chewing and moan.
“That good?”
I mumbled, eyes closed. My mind focused on the granulated texture. The tang of blueberry syrup coated the sides of my tongue.
The couch pressed down beside me.
Opening a single eye, I saw Jasia staring. Satisfaction over her culinary achievement gleamed from liquid chocolate irises. I swallowed hard. Sitting upright, I lifted my coffee for a hasty swig to wash down the crumbs. “You’re enjoying this?” I managed.
“It’s an honor to have your compliment,” she said.
And a compliment to have your honor. The thought inspired a guilty blush at my crass treachery.
“Well.” I stared at the remaining desserts. “It is a virtuous effort.” Heat radiated from Jasia’s body toward my stomach. My eye traced the curve of her up to her face.
Her eyes sparkled with invitation.
I turned my attention to the room.
On the wall next to the hallway, she had a stereo cabinet filled with record albums.
“My dad collected old albums,” I said, standing.
“He liked old country?”
“He did.” One of the covers was visible on the close end. “Look at that. You’ve got a June Carter album.”
“I like the old songs, as well.”
My desire for her was a knot in my chest. I crossed to the stereo, creating distance from Jasia’s heat. Her inviting perfume tickled the back of my throat. Squatting next to the collection, I flipped them one by one. These gems reminded me of Dixon. Which reminded me of the shame of my unrestrained actions. I forced the idea aside, wrinkling my forehead like he often had. The realization increased my discomfort.
“Country Gentlemen, Jim Reeves, Hank Senior ...uh oh.”
“What?” Jasia remained on the couch. She sounded annoyed.
“ZZ Top. Now, that’s a little out of place.” I passed by the Patsy Cline, not wanting to think of her just now.
“I’m an eclectic gal,” Jasia said. The smile had returned to her voice.
“I’ve learned to play some of these old time tunes on my guitar, you know?” I stood and went back to the couch carrying the Country Gentlemen album. Holding it like a cardboard shield, I slouched on the farthest end of the couch and reviewed song titles.
“I remember the three of us singing John Denver and Bob Dylan together,” Jasia said.
I peeked over the album cover.
Jasia gazed out the window. She might be looking into a place I’d hurt her. What logic, or emotion, had been strong enough to compel me away from her? Nothing so intense existed now. Regret tightened my throat. I rose and walked the album back to its home. “I’d better go.”
“You haven’t finished your dessert.” Her voice had lost inflection, expecting nothing. She kept her eyes locked on that window.
I checked my watch. “I have Mother’s car. She wants me to take her shopping.” The lie came so easily. I almost cried out in anguish when I heard it tumble free.
She turned, as if just realizing I planned to leave. “You will come back by? Before you leave town?”
The sudden pleading unnerved me. Desperation had always been outside the limits of Jasia’s emotional range. It meant vulnerability. And vulnerability meant pain.
“You’ll have another one of those little pies for me?”
“I’m running low.”
“I’ll try to hurry.”
She smiled, her dark brown eyes sparkling.
That seductive glint always floored me. I moved for the door, and started to pull it open.
In a second, Jasia had my elbow in her hand and tugged the door the remaining distance.
The honey scent on her breath and heat of her body provoked a tremor inside me.
“It really was great of you to stop by, Connor. I don’t want there to be bad blood between us. It was a long time ago.”
Those brown eyes, constantly in flux, had turned chocolate with the shadow from the door frame. Floral musk drifted around my head and I could feel every muscle in my chest swell with the breathing of it. I glanced at the curving line of her lower lip, caught myself, and stared at her forehead. “I’ll stop by again. Soon,” I lied. “And the coffee and turnover… they were really great.” I pushed at the screen door, pulling myself free from Jasia’s grip.
“Thanks again for stopping,” she said. Her tone had become a neighborly holler.
I rushed to the car.
“You bet,” I yelled back, feeling like a man leaving his best friend’s wife.
I struggled to insert the key in the ignition, my hand shaking badly. The perspiration that coated my upper body began to freeze. I didn’t turn my head to see if she was still standing there. Cranking the key hard, I released a long breath at the whir of the starting engine. I yanked the transmission lever into low and spun a little gravel pulling away from the curb.
“That was too close,” I muttered to the fog-covered windshield. My heart pounded unceasingly in the race toward home. I turned my thoughts toward the upcoming and frightening conversation with Mother over emptying Dixon’s apartment. And what about Dixon’s last will and testament? Until Zach’s comment, I had never considered a personal claim on Dad’s business. Maybe it was time to accept my role as a Pierce in this town.
Whatever else I did, staying away from Jasia Weaver had to be at the top of my list.
The Chrysler shuddered itself to sleep in my mother’s driveway. A small ramp for Mother’s wheelchair abutted the facade of the colonnaded porch. Part of the original railing had been removed and the steps were half-covered by the incline.
The rush of doing wheelies off that ramp
on my banana bike tingled in my solar plexus. I smiled. Then scowled. That adventure lasted about thirty minutes. Mother banged out the front door and started screaming at me to stop. That moment might have been my first premonition of leaving home.
“Thanks, Renée,” I said to the empty car. She had narced on me that day, I was sure of it. Opening the door allowed the cloudy cold to get all over me. I stepped out, shoved the door onto the tail of my coat, and cussed. Tromping up the steps and through the front entrance felt like quitting life.
Mother coasted from the back of the house and met me outside the kitchen, smells of garlic in her wake. “I told you we don’t use the front door.”
“Sorry,” I said as she rolled by. “I went through the apartment with Tony. They’re releasing Dixon’s stuff.”
Her chair jerked to a stop. She spun it viciously and leaned forward with a squinty-eyed glare. “I don’t care what they do with that stuff.” She whipped a one-eighty and rocketed off again.
“Did you know he was listening to Patsy Cline?” I asked.
Mother’s chair didn’t stop. Instead, it made a hairpin turn, skidding on the hardwood. By the time I realized she was on her way back, the chair had made a landing at my feet. “What?”
The blaze in her eyes forced my gaze to the floor beneath us. “You’ve kept this floor in good shape, Mother.”
“The floor! Who gives a good God—?”
I lifted both hands. “Okay. I surrender. Sorry. They, well I guess the detective who came by that morning found the record playing—”
“Playing?” Mother pushed her chair six inches closer. “He was playing the record when he died? That’s what you’re saying?”
“I don’t know.” I willed my feet to step away, fearing the violent intention in her reaction. “I’m saying it was still turning when the detective arrived.”
Mother’s chair eased forward until her foot rest dented the leg of my blue jeans. She barked words in staccato. “Well what does that mean if it doesn’t mean he was listening to the damned thing when he died?”
My jaw muscles clenched.
As I stared over Mother’s head, Renée appeared in my peripheral vision. She stood near the kitchen’s back doorway wielding a large cleaver. Her mouth hung open.
Mother raged on. “That should have killed him! That girl was singing on the radio when Dixon crashed and left me with this.” She slapped the armrest. “I hope it killed him.” She slapped it again. “If he’d become so cold-hearted,” slap, slap, slap, “as to play that song for some whore!”
The last word spat from her lips and tore a hole in my heart. Wasn’t I the same guy? Chasing whores to my death? A cold-hearted whore chaser?
“What whore?” I asked. “What woman?”
Renée broke in, swinging that big knife with some kind of animal blood coating its blade. “I’d have killed him myself if I’d have thought he was up to that!”
“What song?” I asked. “Did I say a song?”
Mother stuck her chin out. “You didn’t have to. There’s only one Patsy Cline song to my mind.” She whisked backward a foot. And then whisked toward me again.
I had to step back. And then I did an about-face and raced to the inner parts of the house. “And what woman?” I asked the empty living room. Bending my face into my hands, I rubbed vigorously. “This place is getting too crazy for me.” I walked through the dining area to the kitchen, avoiding mother’s blockade.
Renée was bent over the sink with half an onion in one hand and the cleaver in the other, sobbing. The freshly cut pieces of chicken rested on the cutting board beside her.
I strode over and spoke before touching her arm. “Hey?”
“Why did I say that?! Why?!” She let out a wail.
I carefully pried the knife loose and placed it next to the chicken. Then I took the onion, its juices burning my eyes. Pulling Renée gently around by her shoulders, I said, “It’s my fault, Sis. I shouldn’t have barged in shooting my mouth off.”
Renée laid her head against my chest. “I don’t want to hate him anymore, Connor. He’s dead. I want to stop hating him.”
I held her and rubbed circles into her back.
Mother had disappeared.
Through the kitchen window the midday sky darkened into a purple-black bruise. An appropriate color for Dad’s funeral tomorrow. Even in death, Dixon Pierce stirred a family mess that touched the skies. The pull of his life on mine was ripping me in half. How could I be just like him? Was I destined for chasing women and booze and bringing misery into other people’s lives?
An urge grew inside of me like that boiling thunderhead threatening the prairie. I needed to resolve the last days of Dixon’s life. For the deeply wounded daughter he’d left behind. For the bitter taste in my mother’s mouth. For my own children. Even if I could not do it for myself, I could not, would not let this happen to Penelope Jane.
I learned many things flipping through Mother Earth News in the Holy Rosary Hospital’s Family Practice waiting room. Blueberries are good for your heart, bananas will save your kidneys, and a shake bolt is the block of wood from which roof and siding shingles are peeled.
None of these facts blocked the memory of twenty-six stitches sutured into my arm by a grumpy doctor after Grandpa’s sour-mouthed dapple gray mare introduced me to barbed wire. Nor did they help me forget the severe cold that came as a result.
That visit to the hospital had kept me out of basketball practice for the final two weeks of the season. Highest scoring game of my sixth-grade career. Missed. All due to a cold I got at the hospital. They smell pure, the tiles sparkle, and all white cleanliness beams brightness at you. But tiny, molecular monsters hide under the beds and inside the waiting room sofa cushions.
After I sent a comforted Renée back to the office, Tony told me over the phone, “Talk to Doctor Jules Marcus about any autopsy work performed on Dixon.” And then he hung up on me.
Now I waited in a chair that became less agreeable with each tick of the second hand, listening to doctor and patient names echoing in the hallway outside the waiting room door, believing the receptionist when she told me the doctor would float by for his two-thirty appointment at any moment.
Maxing out on my education is your reward for being patient. I chuckled.
A glowing white shape flitted by.
“Doctor Marcus!” I called to it.
The shape stopped and transformed into a tall, thin man. “Yes?”
Two long steps put me in front of him.
His white, spiky military haircut topped horn-rimmed glasses resting on a large, sharp nose. Each intelligent eye had a slightly different shade of slate. He seemed taller than six feet, but my eyes came level with his thick, dark eyebrows.
I offered my hand. “Connor Pierce.”
He tilted his head.
“Dixon Pierce’s boy?”
“Yes!”
He smiled, his eyes brightening to nearly the same hue, and grasped my hand. It was a soft, gentleman’s grip that reminded me of women.
He leaned back a little, pointing that thin nose at me. “Now I see it.”
“Do you have a minute or two?”
Marcus’s brow tightened. “I’m very sorry about your father. He thought a great deal of you.”
I detected a remnant of British accent. Maybe the English had a different idea about admiration than I did.
“I was hoping you could tell me a little about... the accident.”
His bushy eyebrows rose in unison. “Oh.”
The back of my neck tingled as he studied me. I might have been the subject of a recent dissection.
“Come along,” he said after three long beats of my heart.
We walked briskly down the hall several steps and into a small office.
He shut the door. “I only have a moment, son.” He pointed at a chair in front of his small, laminated pressboard desk. A piece of trim had peeled free from the desktop edge.
I sat. “Did y
ou find anything odd about my dad’s death?”
He hesitated before slipping into his office chair and rolling it forward. “I’m sorry, Connor. There was no autopsy.”
“No autopsy?” The words jumped out. “They found him naked on the floor of his apartment.”
He nodded with the solemnity of a grave digger. “I’m actually not the coroner, per se. I do a bit of work for the Sheriff.”
“Who’s the coroner then?” I found myself perched on the final edge of the seat.
“Sheriff Crandall. It’s an elected office. Apparently they find it easier that way.”
“So, Sheriff Crandall did the autopsy?”
“No. No autopsy.” Doctor Marcus pursed his lips and scrunched his forehead, creating oddly perfect furrows.
I scooted back into the chair until the back of my knees pressed the cushion. Every event since meeting Tony had put me onto this guy. “Why am I here?” I asked aloud.
He pulled his lips back, altering the look of professional concern to one of personal confusion. “You’d like to know more about the death of your father.”
I chuckled. “Okay. But can you tell me how he died?”
“Well,” he pulled the thin lensed spectacles from his face and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Not precisely.”
“Imprecisely?”
“This is somewhat unsettling.”
“Like when you fail to sew up a heart transplant.”
“No, no. Not quite like that.” The doctor’s lack of emphasis on precision hadn’t invaded his social etiquette. “But, yes. An unexpected turn, I guess.”
“Unexpected?”
“Well,” he returned the glasses to his nose and peered at me. “You, Connor. No one quite expected,” he let the word hang for a beat, “you would ask the question.”
“Why wasn’t there an autopsy?”
“Yes. That question.”
I dropped my chin to my chest. Going around the barn with this guy was dizzying.
“Your mother was in a hurry to bury your father.”
Murder of the Prodigal Father Page 9
