Can’t Never Tell

by Unknown

  “This is my attraction, my meat and potatoes. You can’t sashay in here and take away a man’s next meal.” His protests were drawing more attention than his sideshow spiel had.

  “Sir.” Rudy kept his tone even and leaned close to the irate bowling ball. “What can you tell me about the dead man in your trailer?”

  That shut him up. His eyes bugged out and he froze with his mouth open. Under the blinking bright lights of the midway, he turned a sallow shade of pale.

  Rudy replaced his cell phone on his belt. He’d apparently alerted the troops.

  “If you cooperate, we can do this the nice way, wait until after closing to bring in crime scene and not alarm the guests. Or we can do it the hard way and shut down the whole midway. Your choice.”

  He stared up at Rudy, wanting to argue but quickly calculating the cost. He then grabbed either side of the top of his rough podium and scooted it in front of the steps leading into the trailer. He flipped down a CLOSED sign and said, “This way.”

  “We’ll be off,” I said to Rudy, cocking my head in Emma’s direction.

  Emma hadn’t let go of my hand, which worried me a bit. She wasn’t the clingy type.

  “Can you hang around for a little while? Just in case?”

  “I’m kind of hungry,” Emma said quietly. “And you promised we’d ride the Runaway Bobsled.”

  She must have sensed my hesitation about staying. I’d wondered about the best way to make the evening’s events seem less out of the norm and therefore less scary. Sugar, fat grams, and the threat of throwing up. Couldn’t get more normal than that.

  “Sure,” I said to Rudy. “I’ve got my cell phone.”

  Emma dropped my hand and headed toward the lemonade booth first, without waiting for me.

  Friday Morning

  I discovered that tough little seven-year-olds and experienced medical malpractice attorneys share something in common. Maybe it was a hereditary toughness. I’d refused to let on that I was queasy after the first medical autopsy I’d witnessed. Emma, in turn, didn’t let a leg bone that could have appeared in a museum display case diminish her appetite.

  We skipped the corn dogs with salt-and-vinegar fries and went for the fried elephant ear doused in powdered sugar I’d been craving. We then jumbled it around inside our stomachs on a couple of rides before we wandered over to watch the giant balloon rise and descend on its tether a couple of times, its insides periodically glowing in the dark sky, whooshing with hot air.

  It hadn’t taken much to talk ourselves out of buying tickets for a balloon ride, so I wasn’t forced to learn if I was afraid of those kinds of heights.

  After an hour, I called Rudy to tell him we were heading home, to call me if he needed anything. He sounded as though he’d forgotten he’d asked us to stay.

  Emma spent the night with me, sleeping on the trundle bed in my room rather than the daybed in the next-door sitting room. I didn’t want her to have a bad dream from her fright house visit—or from her culinary adventures. Or maybe it was in case I had a bad dream. In the dark before we fell asleep, we chatted for a while about the new clubhouse I’d promised to build for her.

  The next morning, Emma seemed to take finding mummified remains completely in stride. For breakfast, we grabbed granola bars from my meager stores in the kitchen Melvin Bertram and I share. He and I have mirror-image downstairs offices and upstairs apartments in the Main Street Victorian that had begun life as Melvin’s grandfather’s house, served for a time as the Baldwin & Bates Funeral Home, and had reincarnated as the offices of Bertram & Associates and Avery Andrews, Attorney-at-Law.

  Melvin was in Fort Lauderdale, meeting with a client in a mansion somewhere on a yacht canal, so we didn’t have to worry about disturbing him on our way out. As we walked down the front walk, Emma detoured a few steps off the sidewalk to my giant stone angel statue. She patted the statue’s foot, where it peeked out from under its draped stone robe.

  “I like her,” Emma said. “Even if Aunt Letha says she doesn’t know where you got your sense of propriety.”

  I nodded, certain Emma knew what “propriety” meant. The eight-foot angel did defy convention. It had been destined as a grave marker, but a client decided she’d be happier if the angel moved to my front yard. It now serves as an unusual signpost, with AVERY ANDREWS, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW discreetly carved on her pedestal.

  “Do people see the angel sign and come in?” Emma looked up, her hand still resting on the intricately carved bare foot.

  “Yep.” Surprisingly, the number of people who felt an urge to update their wills had really picked up since the angel had taken up residence.

  I’d had to do a crash refresher on trusts and estates because I had never written a will before I’d returned to Dacus in November. Eight months ago, I’d been a successful trial attorney in Columbia, until my world had unexpectedly changed. What I’d planned as a temporary return to Dacus had become unexpectedly permanent. Spending time with Emma and my family—something I hadn’t been able to do with the work schedule required by complex trial work—was a decided plus. As long as the angel kept bringing in clients needing wills and no one painted over my number inked on the walls in the Law Enforcement Center’s intake cell, I might make it. Not the kind of money—or pressure—I’d been used to, but I might just make it.

  This week, even though vacations are difficult to arrange when you’re self-employed, I’d pledged to take some time off. With granola bars in hand, Emma and I climbed into my 1964 Mustang convertible—my grandfather’s late-life fling—and headed north up Main Street to where the road began to climb into the Blue Ridge Mountains. We were joining her parents and some of their friends for a pre-Fourth of July picnic at Bow Falls.

  “Who all’s coming? Do you know?” I asked after I straightened out of the first curve in the road. We drove with the car top down. By late morning, the day would be too muggy.

  “Some people Dad teaches with, I think. And Jack.”

  She clipped off Jack’s name. I wasn’t sure what that tone meant. “Who’s Jack?”

  “This kid in my class.”

  “Is he the only one your age who’s coming?”

  She shrugged. “Probably.” That didn’t bother Emma. She lived in a world of grown-ups.

  “What’s Jack like?”

  “He’s a freak.”

  I didn’t ask if that was good or bad. Not knowing might make me a freak—the bad kind, the uncool-aunt kind.

  I opted for a safer question. “What makes him a freak?”

  I glanced at her in time to get the full effect of a dramatic eye roll. By the time she got to be a teenager, she would have that polished to perfection.

  “You’ll see. He’s easy to spot. He wears a cape.”

  I could see her point. “He’ll be in the second grade next year?”

  “Uh-huh. That’s okay. No one beats him up or anything. They just know that’s him. He hangs upside down on the monkey bars for most of play period. But he’s okay. For a boy.”

  High praise indeed.

  From what I understood, this picnic was a midsummer ritual for some of the professors and spouses that Frank knew from the university. Most of them didn’t teach in the summer, spending their time on research projects—or goofing off. Who knew what they did? Years ago, when this group had arrived as young professors, they had formed a bond and usually had a mountain picnic the weekend before the Fourth of July, as well as a gathering at Lydia’s and Frank’s around Christmas.

  Partying with a bunch of professors didn’t sound particularly exciting, but I hadn’t had any better offers. The closest I’d come was at the last Fourth Festival planning meeting when Adrienne Campbell, the festival president, had yet again tried to fix me up with Todd David, the city attorney. Professors who might lapse into quoting Beowulf in the original Old English after a few beers was infinitely preferable.

  We hung a wide right onto the cutoff over the hill to the Bow Falls road. I hadn’t been here i
n, gosh, years. As we topped the hill, I strained to catch a glimpse of the lake in the distance, but the hazy air and the now-tall trees blocked the view off the overlook.

  When we pulled onto the rough asphalt leading into the parking area, I noticed how deafening the tree frogs were. Had they always been this noisy? They seemed louder in town recently, especially in the late evening when I often take walks. The rhythmic pulsing would drown out New York street traffic, given the chance. Unlike traffic, though, this pulsed, almost like breathing, as though the world and all that was green inhaled and exhaled in a loud chorus.

  I handed Emma the money to stuff into the fee collection box. Not a voluntary act on crowded weekends because parking lot monitors wandered about. I understand the economics of rationing access to wilderness areas, but paying to walk out to see a waterfall seemed a bit . . . unnatural. Judging from the crowds, the parking fee didn’t keep anyone away.

  “I hope somebody brought potato salad without green crunchy things,” Emma said as she gave a mighty heave to the long car door.

  She walked a few steps ahead of me, and I noticed that I hadn’t done a very neat job braiding her ponytail. Lydia’s fingers would itch to fix it as soon as she spotted it.

  But Emma had brushed her teeth and said her prayers last night, without any prompting from me. So she hadn’t completely fallen apart while she was in my unpracticed care, despite what my brother-in-law Frank feared.

  “There’s Mom and Dad!” Emma took off running, her sneakers kicking up behind her with each step.

  I caught up with them on the narrow paved path just in time to hear her announce, “—found a dead body.” She paused for dramatic effect. “It was sca-ree.” Complete with dramatic hand gestures to emphasize the last two syllables.

  First I’d heard that she’d found it scary.

  Frank’s and Lydia’s gazes went from their theatrical daughter to me, their mouths slightly agape, their eyebrows raised.

  I offered what Granddad would have called a mule-eating-briars grin.

  “He looked like a mummy, all dry and crusty,” Emma continued. “His leg fell off.”

  From the looks on their faces, I could see that the grapevine hadn’t carried news of the discovery as far as their house.

  I filled them in on the evening’s activities, downplaying the drama. “He’d apparently been there for a while. It wasn’t like there was any danger.”

  That last sounded defensive, but I couldn’t help it. Frank’s runner-lean face was pulled into that stern frown I saw too often from him.

  We’d almost reached the top of the gentle slope that ends in the first look-off to the falls.

  “There’s Jack,” Emma announced. She made a skip, the prelude to a full-tilt run to join a skinny redheaded kid, who stood with his parents and a picnic basket at the overlook.

  “Emma!” Lydia called her back. Emma froze mid-stride and spun around, struggling not to look frustrated.

  “It would be best,” Lydia said, “if you didn’t say anything about this, especially to Jack.”

  Emma’s shoulders slumped forward and her mouth fell open. “Mo-om.”

  “You don’t know the whole story. It’s best to wait until you do.”

  Lame reason to keep a good story to yourself, I thought, especially when Jack looked like such a promising audience.

  “The police are investigating,” I said to help out. “Once that’s finished . . .”

  One side of Emma’s mouth knotted in a thoughtful frown, but she nodded and spun into a run.

  Frank hefted their picnic basket and walked on ahead.

  Lydia waited until he was out of earshot. “Avery, how could you get her involved in something like that? She’s only seven!”

  “I didn’t get her involved. We went into a really cheesy, stupid, very unscary fright house at the fair and a mannequin’s leg fell off while we were standing there. End of story.”

  Lydia gave me a dismayed frown.

  I tried to chide her into remembering she’d been a kid once. “Think what a great what-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation essay she’ll have when school starts.”

  Lydia bit her lip and covered her mouth to hide her smile, maintaining a facade of decorum. “We’d have killed to have something like that to write about, wouldn’t we?”

  “Lots better than making up stuff.”

  Emma eyed us as we joined them at the overlook, probably both relieved and suspicious at our laughter.

  Lydia introduced me to Jack and his parents, then Frank and Jack’s dad trudged on up the path toward the top of the falls.

  I overheard Emma whisper to Jack, “She’s a lawyer, and she’s going to build me a clubhouse.”

  He stood stock-still, assessing me with a steady blue-eyed gaze. He didn’t look impressed in the least.

  “She’s the one with the angel statue in front of her office,” Emma continued in a stage whisper.

  From the cock of his head and his continued stare, I assumed that raised me a tiny notch in his consideration. I liked the looks of Jack, with his pale red hair and freckles and his magnificent purple cape.

  “Why do you have that angel?” he asked me.

  “I like her. She watches over me.”

  He studied me a moment and nodded. For a kid in a cape, I guessed just liking something was reason enough.

  “Let’s go.” Lydia waved Emma and Jack along. “We’ve got to finish setting up.”

  I hung back a minute, leaning against the rail fence worn smooth by uncounted hands. The hillside fell steeply off the overlook and rose again on the opposite side of a deep draw. Framed in the middle distance by thick summer green was Bow Falls, the tallest waterfall in the eastern United States. The sound of the water tumbling on the granite rocks carried faintly to where I stood. The rains on Wednesday had fed it full.

  I remembered when the path from the parking lot to the overlook had first been paved, a blasphemy in my mind. Too civilized. Too easy for people to get here now—not that it had ever been hard, as long as you drove slowly and didn’t knock a dent in your oil pan as you dropped off onto the unpaved entrance road. Now, though, it was all very civilized—and crowded. I was joined by a chattering bunch of college kids, not serious hikers, just a carload passing on the way to somewhere else. Hard to get a moment to commune alone.

  Dad said he remembered being able to drive along the path that clung to the hillside and even across the top of the falls. As I walked along that same path, now strewn with boulders, I couldn’t imagine how that was possible. Maybe the boulders had been blasted loose when the state built the road that now ran above my head, invisible in the thick trees on the steep hillside. I listened to a car pass on the highway above and was glad they’d stopped letting people drive along this track. I was sure many had objected to that change. Always a balancing act, access and quiet communion.

  For the short walk to the top of the falls, I had the rare pleasure of having the trail to myself. Where the trail reached the creek bank, the only hint that I’d reached the top of the falls was the faint rumble of water to my right, when it flowed over the rocks and disappeared into the undergrowth. This wasn’t a place where a canoeist could paddle too close to the falls unawares—the creek was shallow, rocky, and un-navigable, and the noise was warning enough.

  The path ended on a narrow section of the creek, where a series of broad, flat stones provided a dry crossing, well back from where the falls made its first drop.

  We were apparently the late arrivals, and this hadn’t been Lydia’s and Frank’s first trip from the parking lot. Lydia had supplied folding canvas chairs for the four of us, and the other families had brought their own. The contents of several food baskets crowded a couple of folding tables set side by side. Lydia introduced a tall man with thinning sandy hair as Spencer Munn.

  He bent to get a beer from one of several coolers. “Can I get you one?”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  Lydia had insisted I didn’t need to
bring anything but myself. I also apparently couldn’t offer any assistance in setting up, so I accepted Spencer’s offer to introduce me around.

  The picnickers seemed to all know each other, but I wasn’t going to remember many of the names. Some of them could have appeared at a county bar or a corporate board meeting and passed without question. Others, though, had clearly embraced the free-wheeling boundary-lessness of the academic life, as evidenced by their outdated clothes and well-worn Birkenstocks.

  Clemson University, where Frank taught, was twenty miles and a world away from Dacus. He and Lydia had bought a rambling farmhouse on the outskirts of Dacus, and he commuted. The distance—mostly a perceptual barrier—had proven sufficient to let Lydia decide when she wanted to engage as a faculty wife and when she just wanted to strip wood floors and paint bead board and go to church circle meetings.

  Spencer Munn introduced me to a tall fellow with skeletal facial bones and a gray rattail hanging past his shoulders, an English literature professor. Eden Rand, a soft-featured woman with a halo of orange hair and wearing billowing acres of mauve and orange gauze, taught sociology. Fred, a buff sixty-year-old, who looked great in his Levi jeans and boots, was a mechanical engineer.

  “Fred here has done some expert witness work, haven’t you?” Spencer said by way of a conversation starter. “Avery’s a trial lawyer.”

  Fred shrugged. “A couple of grain auger accidents a few years back, that’s all.” His blue eyes met mine and held. He’d be good with a jury. Real good. I wondered that he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. His gaze seemed a bit forward, hinting he might be unattached with good reason.

  “Rog!” Spencer waved over a middle-aged man with pale skin, pale eyes, and a pale shirt with faint wrinkles. “Do you know Lydia’s sister, Avery?”

  Rog offered me a warm, slightly moist handshake. His eyes were pale crystal blue and searched me as if he genuinely wanted to remember me.

  “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Rog Reimann.”

  “Thought you might have run into each other. Rog’s wife is a hometown girl. Maybe you know Rinda?”