Don't Turn Around

by Hunter Morgan

  “Maurice Pinkerton,” Bambi repeated when Maury didn’t respond.

  Maury contemplated just lying there, eyes closed, pretending he was asleep so he wouldn’t have to look at Bambi and his ugly spots. But Maury knew from experience that that was only a waste of time. It was only putting off the inevitable. If Maury didn’t take the envelope today, Bambi would just bring it back tomorrow.

  “Maur—”

  “All right! Christ a’mighty! I’m coming.” Maury rose from his bunk. He only had to take three steps to walk out of his open cell door. He held out his hand.

  Bambi, face stern, passed Maury an envelope.

  Maury was going to toss the envelope on the bed unopened and lie down again. See what he could find in TexMex’s mattress again.

  But there was something about the envelope in Maury’s hand that gave him pause. Something about the texture of paper that tapped his attention. He flipped the envelope over and checked the return address. It was a post office box in Millsboro.

  Not from his public defender. Definitely not.

  Bambi walked away, leaving Maury to stare at the envelope in his hand. It had been opened across the top with a letter opener. Everything sent into the prison had to be opened by officers in the mail room. But he still couldn’t help but be excited by the turn of events. Intrigued. The envelope was clearly addressed to Maury in nondescript print, written with a black Sharpie. His personal SBI number and housing unit were printed plainly. This was no mix-up. The letter was for him.

  Maury walked back into his cell and sat down on the edge of his bed, carefully placing the envelope across his prison-white knees. Inside, they wore prison whites day in and day out. It was one of the reasons he was looking forward to work release. In work release, he’d get a uniform most likely. It just depended on what kind of job he got. He was lucky enough to have a skill, his counselor had said. So being an auto mechanic came in handy in ways Maury would never have imagined.

  He stared at the envelope in his lap wondering what could possibly be inside. He lifted the envelope to the light to get a better look. It was a generic white envelope that could have been purchased by anyone. Sent by anyone. It was light; he doubted photographs were enclosed. Just a single sheet of paper, he guessed. He closed his eyes and sniffed the envelope. No hint there of where it might have come from.

  He wondered for a moment if maybe the letter had come from his old girlfriend Sheila. But last he heard, she was in Baylor Women’s Correctional up in Wilmington doing eight to ten for armed robbery. Besides, she hated his guts. She wouldn’t send him a letter. A letter bomb, possibly, but not a plain old letter.

  TexMex rolled over on the top bunk and Maury was reminded that he wasn’t alone. You were never alone in prison.

  Maury stretched out on his back on his bunk and laid the envelope across his chest. He watched it rise and fall as he inhaled and exhaled in perfect rhythm. He would save the letter until later to read. He would savor the anticipation of seeing who had sent him the letter.

  Casey toyed with the business card on her desk. She pushed it around with her index finger. Flipped it over so she could see Lincoln’s name. She was just flipping it back again when Marcy walked into her office.

  “So, are you going to call him or not?”

  Casey grabbed up the business card and dropped it into the top desk drawer, then closed it soundly. “I don’t know.” She grimaced. “The idea of calling a guy, asking him on a date—”

  “Puh-lease.” Marcy rolled her eyes. She was recently divorced but had started dating the moment her ex had walked out on her and their three-year-old son. In less than a year, Marcy had become the expert on dating, or at least the expert on the administrative floor of the hospital. “What happened to being a modern woman? You can karate chop a guy in the crotch for being flirtatious in an elevator, but you can’t call a guy on the phone and ask him out? After he gave you his number?”

  “I don’t teach women to karate chop guys in elevators. You should come to one of my self-defense classes.” Casey frowned at her friend, annoyed that she was making fun of her. “There’s not even such a thing as a karate chop.”

  Marcy stood in the doorway, hand on her hip, giving Casey one of her looks. Marcy was tall, slender and always wore short skirts to work. She had great highlights in her hair. Casey had been thinking about getting highlights.

  “So maybe I’ll call him.”

  “Either you call him or I’m calling him.” Marcy walked out the door.

  “You’re not calling to make a date for me,” Casey called after her.

  “The date won’t be for you,” Marcy hollered back.

  Casey opened the drawer and pulled the card out again. She studied the phone number. It was just Lincoln’s office number. She could leave a message. Get him to call her back. Chewing on a piece of nail cuticle hanging off her little finger, she set the card down.

  She really liked Lincoln. She wanted to go out with him. But this was so hard—putting herself out there like that. And what if Adam called? What if he called and wanted to ask her out this weekend? Would that make her some kind of slut or something, going out with two different men on the same weekend?

  Casey groaned, realizing what a stupid thought that was. She wasn’t intending on having sex with either of them. At least not anytime soon. She just wanted…She wanted to go out on a real date. She wanted to get away from this office, from her father. She wanted to feel pretty again.

  So she would call Lincoln.

  She picked up the card to look at it again and realized his e-mail was also on the card.

  She’d e-mail him. That was even a better idea. That way, if he had changed his mind and didn’t want to go out with her, it wouldn’t be so awkward for him—or her.

  Casey opened the e-mail program on her computer and typed a couple of short lines. She asked him if he was available tomorrow night, Friday, and then shot the note off before she had a chance to chicken out and not send it. Or revise it to death.

  For the next hour, she busied herself returning phone calls to clients. She talked to two different state police officers concerning automobile accident victims who had come into the ER in the last week, one of whom had died. Then she made a call to a local funeral home for another client and made arrangements for the family to drop off the dead man’s suit. A teenager killed in a hit-and-run. Another hard case. The family had had to go out and buy a suit for their dead fifteen-year-old son.

  Casey forced herself to wait an hour before she checked her e-mail, and even as she was opening it, she told herself not to worry if Lincoln didn’t answer right away. Most people checked their e-mail only once or twice a day. He could be in court. He could be downstairs with his grandmother, or at the nursing home she was being transferred to. Casey might not even hear from him until tomorrow…or later. And he might already have plans since it took her all week to get up the nerve to contact him. And should she really leave her father all day tomorrow and then all evening tomorrow night?

  But there it was, the second piece of new mail in her mailbox, posted only eighteen minutes after she’d e-mailed him. RE: Goat chow and dinner

  Lincoln said he’d hoped she would contact him. He suggested a nice restaurant in Rehoboth Beach for dinner and offered to pick her up, or, if she preferred, he would meet her there. That way if she was bored or he creeped her out in some way, he said, she’d be able to make a fast getaway.

  She e-mailed him back, telling him she would meet him there at seven…just in case he creeped her out.

  “I think I’m about ready to go, Dad.” Casey walked into the living room, running some smoothing gel through her red-blond hair. With the colder weather, it easily got staticky and flyaway. She’d been trying to grow it out long enough to wear a ponytail. She hadn’t had long hair since she was sixteen.

  “You sure you’re going to be okay here without me for a few hours?” She stood at the end of the couch.

  He was watching a Discov
ery Channel show on the Valley of the Kings. Frazier was sitting contentedly at his feet chewing on a stuffed dog toy that looked like a mallard duck. It squawked every time he bit it.

  Her flyaway hair tackled, Casey dropped her arms nervously to her sides. Stop fussing with it, she chided herself. Stop fussing. Lincoln already said he thinks you’re attractive.

  “Dad? Can you look at me?”

  Her father stared straight ahead. Omar Sharif continued his monologue as the miles of desert rolled across the TV screen. The dog toy continued to squawk.

  She picked up the remote control and turned down the volume. “Dad?”

  “You know the Valley of the Kings is nowhere near the pyramids or the Sphinx?” he said. “I didn’t realize how far apart geographically they are. I always wanted to go to Egypt, never made it there, Lorraine and I.”

  Casey forced a smile, but her throat tightened. Somehow, her father’s illness seemed even harder to bear when he was lucid like this. Sometimes it lasted an hour or so, sometimes less. But the new medication for Alzheimer’s patients he had just started taking might improve his memory. His doctor was hopeful. Casey was hopeful.

  Not that she and her father had ever had a wonderful relationship or anything. Casey’s parents had been very career oriented. Pleasant, but removed from their daughters’ lives. In her parents’ eyes, it was Lorraine’s role to provide the finances for the family by means of her inheritance, and Ed, the intellectual stimulation. Beyond that, it had been up to their daughters to find their own way in the world. There had never been tenderness between Casey and Jayne and their parents. Emotion was rarely shown in their home, discussed even less frequently.

  But Ed had been a good man. He had contributed to the education of thousands of young, impressionable students over the years, including his own children. It just hurt Casey to know that his time had passed and that he would never be able to teach his grandchildren. He might not even live to see his grandchildren reach school age.

  “I suppose I never really thought about how far apart the pyramids in Cairo are from the Valley of the Kings.” She sat down on the edge of the couch. She had changed three times, settling on a pair of brown slacks and a pale blue sweater that made her hazel eyes appear bluer. “But the pyramids are actually the burial site of only a couple of kings, right?” she probed. The doctor had said it was important to stimulate her father’s brain, to take advantage of the times when he was cognizant.

  “For five hundred years, from the sixteenth to the eleventh century B.C., tombs were constructed in the Valley of the Kings for kings and noblemen.” Ed retrieved the remote from her hand. “King Tutankhamen’s tomb being the most famous, of course.”

  When her father spoke like this, he sounded just like the Professor McDaniel with whom students had come most nights of the week to converse. Not only had her father been well versed in English literature, but numerous other subjects, as well. He had always been a climatology and geology buff, which might be what had led him to his recent interest in meteorology.

  “We saw relics from Tut’s tomb at the Franklin Institute. Do you remember, Dad? Jayne and I took you.”

  Her father stared at the TV screen. It was a commercial for another Discovery Channel show, one where real autopsies were shown.

  “Dad, do you remember going to the museum and seeing things from Tut’s tomb?” she asked again. “There were stone canopic jars and his crook and flail and…and you were fascinated by the chair the king sat in as a child.”

  He repeatedly pushed a button on the remote, changing the channels.

  “Dad, the show you’re watching will be back on in just a second. Valley of the Kings.”

  He set his jaw, changing channels faster. The channel numbers blinked on the upper-right-hand corner of the screen. The numbers were decreasing rapidly.

  She knew where he was headed.

  She rose from the chair and reached for the cordless phone on the end table. “I’m going out for a while with a friend. If you need me, you just push the memory button and the number one, right? Jayne is Memory Two. Now if there’s a real emergency like a fire or—”

  He turned up the volume on the TV until the voice of the weather girl drowned out Casey’s.

  “Dad, if there’s a fire, you need to get out of the house,” she said loudly above the prediction for heavy rains in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. “You need to get out of the house, take the phone with you and dial nine-one-one or go to a neighbor’s, right?”

  “Local on the 8s” began. The local forecast flashed on the screen, accompanied by loud “on hold” music.

  She set the phone down beside him on the couch. “You sure you don’t want to go to Jayne’s? I could drop you off on the way to dinner.”

  He ignored her, but a response really wasn’t necessary. She already knew the answer. He didn’t want to go to Jayne’s. He didn’t like going there at all, and certainly not in the evening. Not when the house was in turmoil with Jayne and Joaquin coming in from work, Chad fussing for his dinner, and the rushing around to get Annabelle off to her gymnastics class or her ballet class or the Children and Art class that Jayne insisted every child needed to attend by the age of five. Casey didn’t blame her father for not wanting to go to Jayne’s; she avoided weeknights there too.

  “Okay, well. You know how to call me on my cell. If you have any problems, any questions…” She rose off the couch. “I left a bag of pretzels on the counter and there’s root beer in the fridge for you. Dog biscuits in the cookie jar for Frazier.” She looked down at her dad.

  He pointed at the TV with the remote. “Going to be windy Monday.”

  She nodded. “See you later, Dad. I won’t be late, but if you get tired, go to bed. I’ll lock up behind me.” She wanted to touch him, to kiss the top of his gray head, something, but sometimes physical contact agitated him. She didn’t want to leave him agitated.

  “See you when I get home.”

  Casey’s mood lightened as she drove east toward the coast. She found a parking space on the same block in Rehoboth Beach as the restaurant and walked in at seven on the nose. Lincoln was already waiting for her in the bar.

  “Casey.” He waved, climbing down off a stool. “You came.”

  She laughed, hooking her purse on the brass hook under the bar and taking the stool beside him. “Of course I came. I’m the one who asked you out, remember?” She smiled, pretty proud of herself. “Well, I guess technically you asked me to ask you out, but…”

  He chuckled with her. “A drink?”

  He was wearing a corduroy suit jacket again, this one moss green. Beneath it, a navy sweater and khakis. He smelled freshly showered and completely delicious.

  She pointed to his wineglass. “What are you having?”

  He looked at his glass. “Um…red. Shiraz.” He glanced at her. “I told you I wasn’t good at this. Shiraz. Definitely.”

  “Sounds good.”

  He ordered her drink and they waited in awkward silence for it. When the young female bartender brought it, Casey and Lincoln raised their glasses in toast.

  “Cin cin,” he said.

  She smiled over the rim of her glass.

  “It’s Italian.” He sipped his wine, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. “I went to Italy this summer. I’m not that great with languages. It’s about the only phrase I came home with.”

  “Italy? I’ve been dying to go.”

  They talked for half an hour in the bar, ordering a second glass of wine, and then were shown to a table. She learned that he was divorced, that he had no children, and that he called his ex-wife, also an attorney, Skitzy-Witzy. Apparently he had called her that even before they were divorced. She learned that he did eat raw oysters, which was a definite plus for him, but that he didn’t like Brussels sprouts, not even fresh out of the garden.

  As the waiter walked away with their appetizer and entrée order, Casey checked her cell phone. She was afraid the bar had been so loud that she might have m
issed it ringing. Which really was foolish because her father never called her.

  “Everything okay?” Lincoln asked.

  The waiter had seated them at a table for two. It was covered with a white cloth. Votive candles sparkled in funky glass vases. Seated across from him in such an intimate space, Casey couldn’t avoid Lincoln’s handsome face.

  “Everything’s fine.” She dropped her phone into her bag. “I just wanted to make sure my dad hadn’t called. He insists he’s fine home alone. His doctor says he still needs to feel a little bit of independence, but I worry about him. My sister says I’m not happy unless I’m worrying about—” She halted. “I’m sorry. I’m rambling. I’m rambling about my crazy dad and my crazy life.”

  “Actually, I’m kind of relieved to know that I’m not the only person with a crazy life.” He leaned forward. “It’s got to be hard dealing with your dad. How advanced is the Alzheimer’s?”

  “He’s somewhere between moderate decline and moderately severe decline, which means—” She cut herself off. “You don’t want to hear this.”

  “You had to hear about my schizo ex-wife.” He leaned back in his chair. “I want to hear about your dad.”

  She exhaled. Actually, it felt good to talk to someone about her problems. She spent so much time dealing with other people’s, which usually were far worse than hers, that she felt as if she was whining whenever she said anything. “It means he’s moving from early to midstage.” She reached for her wine, paused, and looked up at Lincoln. “Honestly, he’s in midstage. The signs are all there; I’m just trying to ignore them. He loses track of time, the day, the week, even the month. He has trouble doing even simple math. But he’s on a new—”

  Casey’s phone rang, stopping her in midsentence. The ring tone indicated the call was coming from her house. “I’m sorry. Excuse me.” She fumbled in her bag for the phone, located it, and hit the receive button. “Dad? Dad, what’s wrong?”

  “Freckles?” Her father’s voice was uncertain.

  “Yes, Daddy, it’s Casey.” She covered her other ear with her hand so she could hear him in the noisy restaurant. “Is something wrong?”