The Opium Equation

by Lisa Wysocky

  “Pain? No. Not me. It’s for someone else I know. Knew. I think.”

  “Well,” he said, unconvinced, “mixing up laudanum on your own is a risky business. Like all opiate-based drugs it’s highly addictive so you need to go to a clinic at the very least. And soon, Cat. Don’t mess with this stuff.”

  “I won’t, Robert. But tell me, where can I find out more?”

  After a long hesitation he suggested the Internet or the main library in Nashville. “But I want you to know that if I thought you were actually going to make up a batch, I’d have to do something about it,” he finished.

  “Like what, Robert?” I didn’t appreciate his attitude.

  There was a long silence on his end. “It would be for your own good,” he said.

  Was that a threat?

  In lieu of a pleasant goodbye I heard a resounding click. Great, I thought, just great. Now on top of everything else, one of my students thinks I’m a drug addict.

  I found it hard to believe Glenda was a druggie, but I kept coming back to it. I dismissed as incomprehensible that Glenda was dealing. So if she wasn’t a druggie and she wasn’t dealing, why bother writing down the formula? Surely she hadn’t been manufacturing laudanum right there at Fairbanks.

  Maybe, I continued, it wasn’t Glenda. Maybe there was some other connection with Fairbanks.

  The phone interrupted my thoughts.

  “I’m at the library but I couldn’t wait to tell you what I found,” said Carole, foregoing the hellos. “This is so cool. Col. Sam was born in 1842 and was nineteen when the Civil War started. He was a big man, heavy too, and limped badly throughout his life from a hip injury received in a fall from a horse when he was young. Because he couldn’t physically take part in the war, he geared up for the war effort. His father was into shipping, agriculture, trade, that kind of stuff, and owned twenty slaves in 1860, which apparently was a lot for someone living in Cheatham County, so he must have been wealthy. It says Col. Sam and his father, Hiram Goforth Henley, built Fairbanks in 1859. Hiram passed in 1862, but Col. Sam prospered during the war anyway.”

  Carole added that the colonel married late in life and fathered a son, Sam, Jr., in 1899 and a daughter, Alice, in 1903, when he was sixty-one. He lived to the ripe old age of ninety-five, when a housekeeper there at Fairbanks found him dead one morning sitting in a chair in front of his fireplace.”

  That made two whose lives had ended in front of that fireplace. I shuddered.

  “What happened to his wife and kids?” I asked.

  “Hmmm. Doesn’t say, other than his wife’s name was … oh get this, Alice Giles. Why does that last name not surprise me? She died in 1909. Doesn’t say what from, or what happened to the kids.”

  I remembered the painting in Opal’s room and wondered if the text said anything about the amount of hair on the colonel’s head. Carole laughed and said, no, it didn’t. There was a photo, but he was wearing a top hat.

  Carole also said that she wasn’t sure, but she thought “Charles T. at C.S.” might be Charles Toner, a senior banker at AmSouth Bank in Ashland City. AmSouth had gobbled up a bank that had gobbled up the old Cheatham State Bank a few years back, but despite large new signs and corporate logos, many still called the bank by the name their grandparents had called it. Cheatham State. C.S.

  “Oh, and get this,” she continued. “I talked to Hill. Glenda had plans to buy a mare from a client of his, but the transaction never took place. Hill was the one who thought Charles T. might be Toner because Glenda told him she had to transfer some funds. Poor Hill.”

  Being the nice, polite neighbor that I am, I asked Carole how Hill was handling Bubba’s disappearance.

  “He didn’t mention it,” she said after a pause. “But Cat, I know that’s because he’s hurting so badly. A man like that just doesn’t open up easily.”

  I resisted the urge to harumpf into the phone. Instead I said, “Thanks, Carole. Great job. I don’t know where this will lead, if anywhere, but I’ll keep it in mind.”

  I hung up the phone slowly and leaned back in the creaky wooden office chair. Hank, a stick firmly in his mouth, plopped down at my feet and I massaged the base of his ears as I thought. Was I on the wrong track? Although the information from Carole was interesting, I wasn’t sure it had anything to do with Glenda’s death or with Bubba’s disappearance.

  I felt sick at the thought of Bubba, and that in itself, was odd. I thought I should be feeling more for the brutal ending of Glenda’s life, but it was Bubba who was ever in my thoughts. I felt that his continual disruptions in the neighborhood happened not because Bubba was a bad kid, but because he was neglected and bored. I agreed with Carole that Bubba had never been offered any kind of guidance. He wasn’t a bad looking kid either. He was overweight, but he had a strong chin, a straight nose, and clear blue eyes the girls would be sure to adore, once he grew up and got his teeth fixed. So what if his dark, wavy hair was in need of a cut, and his usual odor du jour indicated that a long, hot, soapy shower was in order. He was a kid who needed help. Badly.

  Taking a line from Opal, I realized I couldn’t help the dead. But I could help the living. And with any luck, Bubba was still alive.

  Cat’s Horse Tip #10

  “Lead ropes don’t lead horses.”

  18

  THAT EVENING ON THE WAY TO dinner I gave my best impish wave to the press, who were camped out along the road between my driveway and Glenda’s. After I passed them. I played unsuccessfully with the truck radio, trying to get a “traffic and weather together” report on WSM-AM radio, Nashville’s “Air Castle of the South.” Because of the high cliffs on the south side of the road, evidence that the mighty Cumberland River had once been much mightier than it was today, it was hard to get the station even in the best of weather. Of course, listeners in Arkansas and Ohio could probably hear every second of the fifty-thousand-watt broadcast quite clearly. Go figure.

  I continued to wind up River Road and near the end of it turned left just before Sawyer Brown Road, which, if I had taken it, would have led me into Bellevue, a west-side bedroom community for Nashville. A lot of people thought Sawyer Brown Road was named for the country music band Sawyer Brown, but the opposite was true. The band took their name from the road. I don’t know a lot about the history of country music, but living in the Nashville area you can’t help but pick up a few things.

  I made another left on Highway 70 and drove toward Walmart, but stopped before reaching the mega store. The neon sign placed high in Verna Mae’s window repeatedly flashed its retro shades of turquoise and orange. Inside, the sounds of plates clattering, raucous laughter, and a TV Land showing of Laverne and Shirley made the little building vibrate all the way to its ancient foundation.

  Verna Mae’s had last been redecorated in the fifties, or at the very latest, maybe the early sixties. The well-worn booths were covered in patched turquoise vinyl and the walls were hung with pictures and pennants of local high school athletic teams from decades long gone.

  I inspected the walls of the waiting area, playing a game with myself that I did every time I came in. The latest photo I could find was dated 1963, but the frame was different from the others, leading me to believe the shot had been added sometime after the restaurant’s decor had been in place for a while. Nothing new. I didn’t know if I’d be thrilled or disappointed if I ever found a later photo and hoped I’d never find out. I liked Verna Mae’s because everything was spotlessly clean, the food unsurpassed, and the prices so reasonable the food could be considered cheap. My idea of heaven.

  A large young woman in limp brown hair and clothes she’d outgrown thirty pounds ago sat behind the register eating a Snickers bar. When I first began coming to Verna Mae’s, the very large young woman had been a very large teenager, or maybe this was her sister. Either way, I had the idea that she/they were Verna Mae’s granddaughter(s). Verna Mae rarely came out from the kitchen, but when she did, she was inevitably clad in a brown plaid muumuu and a starche
d white apron that would have fit, had her height matched her weight. My grandma always said to trust a cook who looked as if she enjoyed her own efforts, and Verna Mae more than fit that bill.

  “I need a table for two,” I said to the probable granddaughter after I’d had a chance to survey the crowd.

  The young woman’s jaw methodically went round and round as she considered my request. Her mental processes clicked into gear a short second before she finished chewing and she slowly raised a heavy arm to point to a small table that was being cleared at the back of the room.

  Verna Mae’s evening patrons were a generation younger than the breakfast crowd. Those who farmed a few acres this side of Fairview, or the retired folk who lived in Pegram or Kingston Springs and wanted to spend an hour or two at the neighboring Walmart, were the early morning clientele. The evening diners were their sons and daughters––harried working parents with half-grown kids and middle aged couples who’d just sent their youngest off to college and didn’t know what to do with themselves now they didn’t have to ferry their children from one sport to the next. I saw these people every week. They were as regular as clockwork. And so was I, as Darcy and I met here for dinner every Wednesday night.

  I wiggled carefully through the tightly packed tables and was within spitting distance of my own when a hand reached out and tugged at my sleeve.

  “Right here.” I knew the voice as Darcy’s, but I hardly recognized the body that went with it. One reason was the fact that her hair was piled elaborately on top of her head and she had traded her usual grunge jeans and sloppy shirt for an elegant navy designer suit. The other was that she was sitting with a young man whose own attire made Darcy’s usual sloppy jeans look like high couture.

  The kid was thin and lanky, with pasty, spotty skin that reminded me of Elmer’s Glue. He wore faded black jeans with lots of chains attached to the pockets and a multi-stained T-shirt that seemed to be missing its sleeves. I was so engrossed in his hair, worn in a long, spiked, neon Mohawk, that I almost missed the tattoo of a skull on his right shoulder. That would have been a shame.

  Darcy nodded her head in his direction, “Cat, this is Frog. I met him at the barn one day a few months ago––he’s … a friend of Bubba’s.”

  I stood with my mouth agape. It was enough that this horrible creature was sitting at the same table with Darcy, but for him to have been in my barn … I felt violated.

  Frog turned and eyed me up and down, pulling a cigarette from his pocket and twiddling it with his fingers. His eyes were a bright blue and he would have been handsome except for the numerous safety pins that pierced various parts of his face. The surly expression and sneering curl attached to his lip gave me an idea about his attitude.

  “Yeah. The horse lady. Been to your place. Cool.”

  “Uh, yeah. Cool,” I replied, unsure whether I should kill Darcy right now, or wait until after dinner when there wouldn’t be as many people around. After, I thought. No use spoiling my fellow diners’ appetites.

  Frog grinned sideways out of his mouth. “Yeah, me and Bubba, we hang together sometimes. I live just up the road.”

  Instinctively, I knew just which place it was, a dilapidated mobile home partially hidden behind the old VFW on the way to Ashland City. I remembered hearing about his granny just after I moved to the area. Her name was Cherry Berry, and she apparently thought it would be cute to name all her kids after certain kinds of berries, so you had to look at this kid and figure in the mentality of his forebearers.

  Thanks to Granny Cherry, we were now blessed with her sons Goose and Cran, and the twins, Black and Blue, who both happened to be blonde. Sister Ras left for parts unknown years before I arrived, so I’d missed the pleasure of getting to know her. Hopefully somewhere along the way Miss Ras had the presence of mind to change her name. If I had my genealogy straight, Frog’s father was one of the twins. Guess it didn’t matter much which one.

  Frog kept leering at Darcy, so I casually moved behind her, as much to attract his attention as to get away from him. To take a word from Glenda, he smelled a “wee” bit stale.

  “So. Frog. Aren’t you a little old to be playing with kids?” I asked in my sweetest voice. “After all, you’re what, seventeen, eighteen? Bubba’s only ten.”

  Frog shrugged. “Sixteen next month. Age don’t matter. Bubba an’ me, we’re soul mates, if you know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “No skin off my ass,” he shrugged. He surveyed the room and, after finding nothing of interest, elaborated. “Neither of us got ma’s. Our pa’s are drunks. We ain’t got no wheels an’ we’re within walkin’ distance. That enough?”

  I sighed and nodded. What a world.

  “Get this, Cat,” Darcy said excitedly. “Frog says he saw Bubba Monday morning, late.

  “Noon,” Frog corrected. “It was noon. I’d got me an appointment with the law, if you get my drift. One o’clock over to Nashtown. My ol’ man, he had to take me. Warn’t too pleased about it none, I can tell you. Just a little problem with some wheels I borrowed an’ everyone goes an’ makes a big deal about it. I don’t get it. Me an’ my ol’ man, we left the house at twelve o’clock sharp. By the time you get a parking place and get to that courtroom, it takes ’bout an hour. Been through it lots of times before, so I know. Anyway, I seen Bubba when we went by. He was crawlin’ through the fence that divides his pa’s place from that fancy house. Where that lady got herself kilt. I reached over and honked the horn, but it don’t work so I pulled the plastic off where the window used to be and hollered at him, but he didn’t hear me none.”

  Frog pulled a lighter out of a pocket. Why wasn’t I surprised to see the lighter had a chain attached to it? He flicked the instrument several times, as if to test the strength of the flame. When no flame appeared he scowled briefly and shoved it back into his pocket.

  “Frog, did you know that Bubba is missing and that the police are looking for him?” I asked.

  “’Course. Even we po’ folk got the t-vee. Couldn’t miss it.”

  “So why haven’t you told the police? This is crucial information. It might help find Bubba.”

  Frog’s response was to ignore me and lean in closer to Darcy. “You’re pretty cute,” he whispered. Flecks of spit displaced by two silver studs in the center of his tongue dropped onto the table in front of her. “Mebbe later, you an’ me can go somewhere, an’ you know … talk or somethin’.”

  Frog leaned back, his gaze traveling up one side of her and down the other. Then slowly, crudely, he winked. I suddenly remembered someone once told me that it takes forty-two muscles in your face to frown, but it only takes four muscles to extend your arm and smack someone upside the head. The thought was tempting.

  Darcy’s response to Frog’s wink was a single bored sniff. Smiling, as if he thought he could get her to change her mind, Frog returned to the question at hand.

  “Dunno ’bout talkin’ to no cops,” he said. “Jus’ not my way, I guess.”

  “But the police are looking for Bubba to charge him with a murder he didn’t commit,” I said, raising my voice.

  Diners on either side of our table looked up, their forks frozen halfway to their mouths.

  I lowered my voice and put my face next to Frog’s. “If I don’t find Bubba before the police do, your friend’s ass will be in jail for the rest of his life. Come on, Frog, the kid’s only ten years old. Ten years old. He’s still a little kid.”

  Frog slowly unfolded himself from his chair. Upright, he wasn’t nearly as tall as he looked sitting down.

  “Lady, get the hell off my back.”

  Briskly, he stepped past me and bumped directly into the path of a furious Darcy.

  “That’s right,” she spat, “just leave. Like that will fix everything. Go ahead. I’m sure it won’t be the first time you left a friend hanging. You’re a real tough guy, Frog. Real tough.” Darcy snorted. “So listen up. Tomorrow, if you haven’t told the police what you know, I’
ll personally come by and string you up by your balls.”

  It occurred to me that Mason Whitcomb had not been as passive in Darcy’s upbringing as I had thought. Whether or not she was up to Frog, however, remained to be seen.

  Diners throughout the restaurant were still staring, waiting to see what would happen. I had that fluttery, jittery feeling in my stomach, the same as when I was searching Bubba’s house, and I tried not to let myself understand that I was terrified.

  The obese woman at the register reached for the phone, whether to call the cops or to answer a call, I didn’t know. Frog stood staring at Darcy, apparently trying to decide if she was serious. I decided yes, she was, and I was proud of her for it.

  Suddenly, Frog laughed. He leaned on the table and pointed at Darcy with a long, grimy fingernail. Around the room, others laughed too, and finished bringing their forks to their mouths.

  The woman at the register put the phone down and reached for another candy bar. Next to me, Darcy managed a weak smile.

  “You,” Frog laughed, “are one dumb shit.”

  She gulped in a deep breath of air. “Yeah, I know. But Bubba’s my friend, too. And I want him found. Alive and well.”

  I stepped in. “Frog, we’re just trying to save you some trouble.” This was a blatant lie, but I didn’t think he was smart enough to figure it out. He was at least a half quart low on brains. “The police will find out that you and Bubba were friends. And they’ll come calling on you. Don’t you think it would go a little better for you if you went to them? Particularly in light of your recent, um … incident with the wheels?”