by Anna Castle
“Are you sure you want to work with those two?” Mr. M. came up behind me.
I turned toward him with relief. “Maybe we can do it all by email. So what exactly have I been volunteered for, anyway?”
He told me about Greg’s offer of a website for the museum. Greg would donate the server space and help us set up a template and then Jim and I would provide the content. We chatted a bit about where I should look for old photographs, starting right here in this room. Mr. M. assured me that Jim and I would be paid something for our work, if less than the going rates.
Krystle glided over to join us, beaming at Mr. M. He was about to make introductions when somebody jostled my arm, making me splash coffee on my hand.
“Hey!” I stepped toward the refreshment table to set down the cup and yanked a few napkins off the stack to wipe my hand.
“’Scuse me.” It was Jim. His voice sounded slurred; he must have taken the drowsy kind of Benadryl.
“Time to drive you home, Allergy Boy.” I reached out to take his arm when he started swaying from side to side like he was having his own private earthquake.
“Whoa,” he said. He took a step back to balance himself and somehow missed. He stumbled, lurched forward a step, and stumbled again, bumping into Krystle and knocking her cup right out of her hand. Coffee flew out of it, splashing Greg’s hand-knit sweater.
“Watch it!” Greg tried to catch Jim’s arm, but Jim had turned back toward me again.
“Woozy.” He grabbed my arm and looked me square in the face. His eyes were unfocused.
“You need to sit down, son,” Mr. Muelenbach said. We started to take Jim’s arms to guide him toward the chairs when he collapsed against me. I tried to hold him up but I wasn’t braced for that much dead weight. Down we went, with me underneath.
“Help me!” I pushed against Jim’s chest to liberate myself. He was out cold. It was like pushing at a sack of grain.
“Call emergency,” someone said.
“On it.” Deputy Finley appeared in my line of sight, cell phone at his ear. “Stand back, please.” He made a sweeping gesture with his free hand. I was grateful; it was freaky to be lying on the floor and see faces peering down at me.
Mr. M. rolled Jim over on his back, allowing me to crawl out from under. I knelt next to him and put a hand on his cheek. “He’s cold.”
I was shocked. I was expecting a fever. How could a person suddenly go cold?
“That’s not good.” Mr. M.’s brow creased.
“Let me see.” Marion knelt beside me and laid her competent hand across his brow. “He’s clammy.” She put a finger on the pulse at his throat and made a clucking sound with her tongue. She looked up at Deputy Finley. “They’d better hurry.” The fear on her face scared me more than anything else had.
Jim was sinking fast. He hardly seemed to be breathing anymore. I noticed his fingers were still stained pink from that stupid cake. I wondered if I should wipe them clean. Would that make him better?
I put a hand up, blindly, and Mr. M. took it and helped me to my feet. He helped Marion up, too. We took a few steps back, respecting the invisible barrier that Deputy Finley had created.
The deputy snapped his phone shut and put it in his pocket. “Coupla minutes.” He looked down at Jim and then around the area with his lips pursed and his hands on his hips. Burrie was tidying the refreshment table with shaking hands. She looked fifteen years older, her downturned mouth drawing her face into sharp angles. The rest of us stood and stared and waited for Finley to tell us what to do.
Or maybe we were waiting for Jim to sit up and say, “Whew! That was a doozy!” Then we could all laugh and go back to chatting, happy with our cookies and our fresh new projects and our room full of silent animal heads. Jim was a joker, after all. Maybe he was just fooling around.
“Did he eat anything? Drink anything?” Deputy Finley asked.
“He had half of one of those pink cakes,” I said. “And some apple juice. And he took two Benadryls about ten minutes ago. Here.” I swooped in and snagged the remains of the cake before Burrie could drop it into her stack of dirty cups.
I handed it to Deputy Finley and he wrapped it in napkins and tucked it into his shirt pocket. “Where are the pills?”
“In his pocket, I think.”
He nodded.
And so we waited. Nobody spoke. I thought I could hear everyone breathing, everyone except for Jim.
After an eternity that lasted four or five minutes, we heard sirens outside. The doors banged open and the emergency medical team bustled in with their equipment, shooing us out of their path like chickens.
Chapter 10
I went home expecting to spend the night sitting by the phone, waiting for news about Jim. Maybe they’d have to helicopter him to a hospital in San Antonio. He was from San Antonio, originally. He had family there. He might stay there for a while, to recuperate. I thought about the drive, how long it took, round trip. I could help them move stuff back and forth, if they needed. The Beast was great for hauling stuff and I had the time.
Then Marion called, not thirty minutes after the EMS truck left the museum. She said Jim had died on the way to the hospital.
The whole town went into a state of shock for the next week. People walked around with downcast faces, talking in low voices. I helped Debbie Schmidtzinsky, Jim’s assistant at the newspaper, put out a commemorative edition full of pictures of Jim with various members of the community. He’d attended every public event in Long County for the last ten years. We were both OK while we were working. It felt good to handle photographs of Jim and help Debbie do the page layouts. We didn’t talk much; that was good, too.
I thought I was doing fine, until I got back to my studio with my copy of the fresh Jim Donnelly edition. I sat in my regular chair between the computer and the big worktable, spread the paper out, and burst into tears, sobbing like a little girl. Then I went to Marion’s and sat on the couch in her den playing Call of Duty with her son Robbie all evening. She suggested I hold a wake for Jim at my studio, as a more constructive form of coping than the endless slaughter of imaginary enemies.
Her thinking, as usual, was first-rate. We decided on a week from Saturday, to give everyone time to plan their potluck contributions.
Precious little photography got done that week. Under Tillie’s orderly influence, I had started cataloging my photographs, going all the way back to high school. The work was mechanical: scanning slides and prints, sorting things into folders, typing in the details that I could remember, uploading it all to my online storage vault. A good chore for the slow season, it turned out to be a good job for a season of grief.
I hadn’t known Jim for very long, but his death left a huge hole in my life. I’d gotten used to popping down to the newspaper office in the afternoon for a wake-me-up break of Diet Snapple and silliness. As an Army brat, I was used to making friends quickly. But I was usually the one that left without warning.
I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I scanned the same print three times before I caught myself. My mind kept churning up the image of Jim, lying on the floor, his lips and fingers stained pink from that stupid cake. I couldn’t help thinking the cake was to blame. Maybe he was allergic to coconut or pink dye. Maybe the ingredients were tainted, like that Chinese dog food thing a few years back.
None of it made sense. I was stuck in one of those stages of grief — the Insane Theories stage. So I sorted another batch of photos, trying to fill my head with images of natural beauty. The only good thing about the grieving was that I almost forgot about the situation with Greg.
The situation. Was that what I was going to call it? I should call a spade a spade: the blackmail. As the week dragged past and Ty’s weekend visit loomed closer, the situation returned to the front of my mind.
Tell him; don’t tell him.
What was I going to do?
Chapter 11
Ty picked me up on the way out to his ranch on Friday evening. He’d brou
ght insulated sacks full of goodies from Whole Foods and cooked us up a gourmet feast, which we ate in the breakfast nook in the kitchen. Checkered curtains shut out the winter night. The house was quiet with his sister and her boyfriend off vacationing in Florida. Diana and Ty had jointly inherited the ranch when their father died. They managed to share their childhood home with a minimum of fuss, since he was only there on weekends and her boyfriend had a place in town.
I hadn’t made up my mind if I was going to tell Ty about the photograph or not. The niggling voice of conscience accused me of cowardice, but my inner optimistic fool maintained the illusion that I could find my own way out of this mess. After which the sting would be gone and the confession would be easier.
And then the kitchen was so cozy and Ty looked so burned out. His workweeks were long and furiously hectic, juggling schedules, courting investors, and herding prima donna programmers toward the company goals. There were tantrums and there were tears. Sometimes there were fistfights.
“How was your week?” I asked as I cut a bite of tender salmon, grilled to perfection and topped with a mango salsa. I always ask.
“Don’t ask!” Ty answered, passing me the salad of wild greens with raspberry-walnut vinaigrette. He always says that. But after an eighty-hour week in a pressure-cooker, he needs to vent a little steam. Feeling virtuous, I kept prodding until he got it all out. Putting his needs first gave me an excuse to avoid my own dilemma.
Things were worse than usual this month. They were counting the days until the big demo for the Japanese moguls. Apparently investors of that gigantitude were hard to come by these days. And these days, they were all skittish, like overbred horses: fretful, finicky, looking for reasons to gallop away. It was sink or swim time, he said. And he had a large chunk of his personal fortune riding in that boat.
I couldn’t lay more trouble on him tonight. Not with the skittish horses in the risky boat.
By the time we got to the hazelnut cheesecake and organic Guatemalan espresso roast, those little stress creases on his forehead had disappeared and that come hither, you saucy wench gleam sparkled in his eyes. Another stress-relieving exercise I was happy to perform.
* * *
I woke up the next morning, snuggled against Ty’s long back, feeling peaceful and balanced. That lasted almost a whole hour.
We went up to Mt. Noble to work on restoring an old rock wall. It wasn’t much of a mountain by international standards, but at 1,850 feet it was the highest point in the county and it commanded a spectacular view of the Hill Country. The sun warmed the ground, but the breeze rose chilly from under the oaks that clustered on the slopes. I drew in a noseful of Hill Country perfume: tangy salvia, damp granite dust, and Ashe juniper.
Nobody knows what the wall was for. All that was left was a semi-square of dry laid rocks, still shoulder high in some places. When Ty was a kid, he and his buddies used to play Rangers and bandidos up here, using the wall as a fort. I think rebuilding it connects him to that carefree past.
Also, for him it’s a form of meditation. The rock is the rock; it fits how it fits. His hands are the channel for finding that fit. For me, it’s more of a knuckle-scraping, back-straining exercise in frustration. Rocks are heavy and lumpy and hard all over. None of them fit. They never did fit because the people who built this wall were crazy and so they never will fit.
“Ow!” I cried as a gnat flew up my nose and I dropped a ten-pound rock on my foot. I jumped up, snuffling out the gnat, wiping my nose on the sleeve of my plaid flannel shirt.
“Why don’t you take some pictures?” Ty sounded testy. My edginess was bumping him out of his Zen.
I usually do take pictures when we come up here. I’m still seeking the shot that will capture the feeling of infinite connectedness that the panoramic view gives me. That’s my Zen. I got my camera out of the truck, thinking about a nice shot of Ty becoming One with the rocks. As I focused on his thoughtful face and powerful hands, the image of Greg’s perverted version of my figure study flashed into my mind and blocked out everything else.
I couldn’t press the shutter. I couldn’t bear to look at Ty through the viewfinder.
Zen be gone.
“Dammit to all kinds of hell!”
Ty sighed loudly and set aside the rock he was working with. He levered himself to a standing position with a small grunt. “What’s up with you today? Are you bored? Do you want me to run you home?”
“No, no,” I lied. “I’m fine, I’m just—.”
“A little crabby?” Ty cocked his head and gave me a spine-melting look. “I thought we took care of all our residual crabbiness last night.”
“We did. It’s not that.” I ought to have said, “Here’s the thing,” and told him the whole story, right then and there. But I really was feeling crabby now, what with the bruise on my foot and the gnat up my nose. If I tried to tell Ty about the photographs in this mood, I would sound defensive and whiny and that would make it worse.
Besides, Greg had gotten between me and my viewfinder. I wanted to take him down myself.
“I guess I’m just feeling sad about Jim.” Which wasn’t a lie. I did feel sad, the minute I said it. His death was a big component of my bad-mood mix.
“Ah, darlin’.” Ty covered the distance between us in a few swift strides, scooping me into his strong arms and pulling me against his comforting chest. “I’m sorry. I forgot what good friends you two were.”
Tears filled my eyes that had nothing to do with Jim.
Chapter 12
Marion had thought the wake would give me a sense of closure. It was a great idea and planning it with Tillie was a fine distraction, but for real closure, I needed facts. I couldn’t stop thinking about that pink cake and how sudden Jim’s collapse had been.
Somebody must know something and I wanted to know what they knew.
My father, Colonel Daniel Boone Trigg, was an Army doctor. He always said to go to the top if you want authorization, but go to the guy at the switchboard if you want information. I wasn’t sure if they had switchboards anymore, but I knew what he meant and where to go in Lost Hat. Felipe Garza was the desk sergeant in the sheriff’s department. If there was anything to know, he would know it. And if it were worth telling, he’d be telling it.
Monday morning I walked myself over to the Long County Law Enforcement Center. The center occupied a city block on the southeast corner of the courthouse square. It was two stories tall, sleek and efficient, built in the plush nineties to serve the future. The lobby, if that’s what they called it, was wide and high and done up in calming blues and beiges. Every sound echoed.
Luckily, Sgt. Garza was manning the front desk. His full moon face rose above the half-moon counter. He peered around another guy in uniform who was leaning against the counter, staring intently down at something. Garza gave me a little wave of welcome and turned back to the something. Suddenly, both men shouted “Whoa-ho!”
“Would you look at the size of that pompano!” Garza cried with delight.
As I approached, the other officer turned his head and flashed me a hundred-watt smile. It was Deputy Finley, he of the gleaming hair and the knife-pleated pants.
“I’ll lay you ten that’s at least a twenty-pounder,” Finley said, jabbing his finger at the small TV behind the counter.
“No way, Mike,” Garza said. “You know what the sheriff said.”
“Just a ten-spot. Nothing to get worked up about.”
Garza pressed his lips together and shook his head. Finley shrugged a shoulder. “Don’t make me no never mind.”
Garza turned to me, seeming glad for the interruption. “Howdy, Penny. What can we do you for?”
“Hey, Sergeant Garza,” I said. “Deputy Finley.”
“You’re that photography gal,” Finley said.
“That’s me.”
I smiled at the men for several seconds, suddenly at a loss for words. They waited with patient expressions that were wearing thin. I spit it out. “I’v
e been wondering about Jim. If there’s any news about how he died.”
Garza’s face registered instant sympathy. “Dolly told me you were there when it happened. It must have been horrible. You shouldn’t dwell on it.”
“I’m not dwelling. I just want to know what happened. People are saying it was an overdose, like a bad mix of medications. Basically, that he killed himself by accident. Is that true?”
Garza shrugged. “Could be.”
“But do they know? Or are they guessing that was it because he took a lot of pills?”
Finley said, “It’ll be weeks before we get the results of the autopsy, but the first estimate of cause of death is usually the right one.”
“So they will do an autopsy?”
“Always, in a case of sudden death. It’s required by law. We don’t have the facilities here, of course. We sent him to Travis County, where he’ll have to wait his turn.”
“I understand.” I grinned sheepishly. “I know this sounds crazy, but I keep thinking about that pink cake Jim ate right before he died and wondering if it had something to do with it. You know? I can’t believe he could do something so stupid as accidently poison himself.”
“Not stupid,” Garza said hastily. “Don’t think that, Penny.”
“It’s a lot more common than you think,” Finley added. “People take too many pills these days. And some of that over-the-counter, so-called herbal stuff is pretty potent.”
Garza said, “Jim was taking a lot of medications, Penny. The cabinet in his bathroom was chock-full of stuff. There was Propranolol for hypertension — my old man takes that one — and a whole bunch of different cold medicines. He had a prescription for Xanax, too.”
“What’s Xanax?” I asked.
“It’s for anxiety,” Garza said. “I looked it up. We won’t know what all he had in him until they do the autopsy, but the moral of the story is, don’t mix your meds.”
“Hmm.” It sounded plausible. “So, you don’t think the cake was tampered with?”
