A Fragment Too Far

by Dudley Lynch

  Seeing that I had time, I hurried around the desk. Squatted down beside her chair. Took a gentle grasp of one arm. And told her to take deep breaths.

  She gave it a try.

  The better part of a minute passed. Then she said in a quiet voice, “Thank you.”

  I asked if she’d like a drink of water. She would. I left the room to ask the receptionist to get her one. The request alarmed her employee. I assured her that the good doctor was going to be all right.

  When color returned to Dr. Simpson-Mayes’s face, I told her I was willing to postpone the discussion.

  For the second time, she said that we needed to get to the bottom of this. “This has all gone so wrong. So dangerously, dangerously wrong.”

  I returned to the couch. Sat at one end. Motioned that she would be welcome to sit at the other. She placed her water glass on her desk and moved to join me. I didn’t need to remind myself to tread this path on cat’s feet. “Would you like to start at the beginning?”

  Her head bobbled up and down for the briefest moment, then switched to a firm no. “Wouldn’t be fair.”

  “Fair to whom?”

  “Fair to you. To the people who elected you. To everyone who lives in this innocent, naive little place. Fair to me, to my family. Fair to the professor. Fair to the people who died in his house.”

  I begged to disagree. “If our naive little town is full of well-heeled serial killers, it’s already lost its innocence. Isn’t it time we faced the truth and dealt with the facts?”

  Some of the electricity returned to Dr. Simpson-Mayes’s voice. “Oh, don’t be so goody-goody, Sheriff. You’re absolutely clueless about what’s going on.”

  “So that warehouse isn’t a factory for abusing people?”

  “That warehouse may be nothing at all. On the other hand, it could turn out to be one of the most brilliant ideas in history. Or at least, it could have been.”

  “And you can tell me why?”

  We’d reached another crossroads in our conversation. I could tell because of what she did with her hands. She began rubbing her wrists. First on one hand, then the other. Not gestures of confidence. She was uncertain. Maybe afraid. Until she decided which way to go, I’d best say as little as possible.

  In the end, Dr. Simpson-Mayes didn’t take either fork in the road. She split the difference.

  “I can tell you a story.”

  Okay, if I did it carefully, I could join the conversation. “I would welcome a story.”

  “A hypothetical story.”

  “Hypothetical would be nice.”

  “More like a fairy tale.”

  “A fairy tale would do.”

  “Let’s say that a young troubadour came to your little village in the far-away woods. He came with a strange object and a strange tale.”

  I managed to keep my lips zipped. But wasn’t able to keep the smart-ass who hides away in the back closet of my mind in check. Sure, lady, and the angel Gabriel rode into town in a flaming red convertible and demanded a double meat cheeseburger.

  She’d noticed my eyebrows rise. For the first time since my arrival, she permitted herself a sliver of a smile. “Remember, you said a fairy tale would do.”

  “Always loved fairy tales.”

  “The young troubadour didn’t tell his strange tale to just anyone. Only a carefully chosen few. He made up another story to tell everybody else.”

  This time, I shared a smile, hoping it didn’t come off as condescending. “Sounds like a cagey guy.”

  That didn’t get much of a response because Dr. Simpson-Mayes appeared to be deciding where she was going next with her obfuscations. And, likely, how she was going to handle my response to them. “What was even weirder was what he did with the strange object.”

  I blinked. Stayed quiet like a good kindergarten student should at story time. Waited. And waited. She didn’t seem to know where she wanted to go next.

  The trained interrogator in me couldn’t stay in the corner any longer. “So what did he do with the strange object?”

  “Nobody knows. That’s what has torn this county apart for the past seventy years. I’ve begun to wonder if there was ever any strange object to begin with.”

  “And the warehouse?”

  “Oh, if the warehouse is ever used for what it’s designed for, all the strangeness will disappear. And new wonders will have arrived. Flagler will be transfigured. And world-famous. Forever.”

  That “transfigured” word again. Was my head going to swim like this every time I heard it?

  It seemed wise at the moment to sink a hand into the couch cushion and steady myself. My equilibrium felt threatened.

  I saw my father being lowered into his grave. Saw him telling me about his friend, the professor. Saw him being hugged by a woman with no features. Saw his name on a weathered belt and his initials on a gaudy belt buckle. Saw him pinning his star on his young son, the family’s third sheriff. Saw Dr. Carmichael’s bones in the cedar box with my dad’s belt around his neck.

  A story had been nice. But the time for fairy tales had passed. I had questions that this woman could answer. Questions that needed sheriff-type answers, not a kindergarten make-believe-style story.

  “Okay, I get some of that. The stranger in your story, he’s Professor Huntgardner, right?”

  She plucked something off her dark pantsuit, flicked it into space, and gave me a shoulder shrug. She wasn’t saying.

  From that point forward, our conversation became tit-for-tat. I served first. “He’s been another of your clients.”

  “I have many clients.”

  “He’s told you the real story of why he came to Flagler and what he expects to happen.”

  “You know I can’t talk about what clients tell me.”

  “Then what have you been doing in this conversation?”

  “I’ve been telling you a hypothetical story.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me where the professor is? Is he dead or alive?”

  “What makes you think I would know that?”

  I almost ended the exchange there. It had reached the stage where it felt like I was arguing with a drunk.

  I had two choices. I could reach for my handcuffs, frog-march Dr. Simpson-Mayes out of her office, and lock her in a jail cell until she was willing to be straight with me. But if I pushed too hard, I’d most likely lose access forever to her unique understanding of Flagler’s deadly march toward — what? Transfiguration?

  Gazing at her, I saw a look in her eyes that I’d seen twice before. It seemed to run in the Mayes family. The tree doesn’t grow far from the apple.

  I did answer her question. And it may not have surprised her, but it did me. When had my mind locked in on this insight?

  “I think you know because the Mayes family is all that stands between the professor and a bullet.”

  Chapter 51

  Dr. Simpson-Mayes remained on my mind long after our talk. It wasn’t the woman herself I kept thinking about. But rather the complications that her choices in life were now bringing her way. I realized that I was experiencing something similar. Complications from my choices in life.

  One complication was that I’d not put a ring on Angie’s finger yet because of a problem with the finger. I didn’t know how long I could expect it to be around.

  It was the thorny old issue that two ambitious, successful people in love so often faced. If they pledged to live their lives together, which of their careers was going to get priority?

  I’d probably run again for sheriff, so I wasn’t planning to go anywhere soon. And Angie could be transferred out of Flagler to Timbuktu on any given Monday. She’d never said it with emphasis, but she didn’t need to. She was planning a career with the FBI unless something bigger and better came along. And that wasn’t likely to happen in Flagler.


  The odds were high that her next assignment would be to the bureau’s national headquarters in D.C. Should she choose not to climb the ladder there, she could expect the opportunity to come in one of the outfit’s premier big-city bureaus — New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami. What was a countrified one-eyed sheriff from the Texas outback going to do with himself in places like that?

  The problem was so knotty that we’d avoided talking about it. At all. It was just about the only serious thing between us that we hadn’t treated as an open book.

  But deciding our future wasn’t what was staring me in the face. How much was I going to tell Angie about what had happened in the three days she’d been gone?

  The more I’d thought about it, the stronger my resolve had become. There wasn’t a lot I could tell her. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust her. It was more that I didn’t know what information or which of my sources I could trust.

  She’d want to get involved. It was her nature. And I didn’t need another wild-card player. Besides, Flagler was a tenuous place at the moment. I didn’t want her in danger. And I didn’t want her proactive disposition endangering me.

  I needed a little time.

  Maybe putting it to her that way would be enough if the subject came up. And, knowing Angie, it would.

  Dealing with the potential drama of Special Agent Steele’s return had crowded everything else out of my mind. So much so that, with my missing eye, I never noticed the suitcase.

  The one lying flat on the floor two steps inside the door leading from my garage into my kitchen.

  The one I tripped over, creating a minor Vesuvius.

  The suitcase toppled over with a loud slap and skidded a couple of yards. I stumbled into the kitchen like a spavined kangaroo.

  Because I’d thrown out my arms to keep from slamming into the bar counter, I’d lost my grip on my briefcase. It sailed halfway into the den and kept sliding on the floor tiles. Each time one of the metal-reinforced corners encountered a tile joint, it made a loud clicking noise. Clickety-de-click-de-click.

  Angie looked on wide-eyed from where she was arranging our eating utensils on the bar counter.

  When she saw no signs of lasting damage, she did the Angie thing. Turned it into a joke. Her question, I realized, was going to be a standard laugh line for us as long as we had a relationship. “Sheriff Luther Stephens McWhorter, this another official daft day for you?”

  Then she grasped how serious this could have been. “Lordy, I’m so sorry, Luke. I was carrying my own briefcase, juggling enchiladas, tugging my suitcase and I . . . Oh, sweetheart, I need a seeing eye dog.”

  That struck me as funnier than her crack about official daft days. “No, the one-eyed sheriff needs a seeing eye dog, hopefully with two eyes.”

  What the one-eyed sheriff really needed hadn’t changed since he’d spotted the buzzards eating the defleshed corpses. He needed answers. And he needed to be careful about the Niagara of conflicting facts and suspicions he’d faced ever since.

  More were coming. Delivered by a secret emissary from no less than the president of the United States. For now, I had to keep Angie in the dark about a lot of this. And hope I could keep it from doing lasting damage to our dreams for a future together.

  Chapter 52

  We’d each consumed one of Casa Mariachi’s green-chili-sauce-soaked enchiladas when Angie dropped her bombshell. It was as telling a lesson as I could remember on the dangers of assuming you can know what to expect of a close companion.

  “I alerted the bureau’s Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative people that you might be calling. About what you and the assistant fire marshal found in the old Cromwell Company warehouse.”

  I didn’t drop my fork.

  I managed to prop it against the other enchilada on my plate.

  Now that both hands were free, I could reach for the oversized paper napkin in my lap. Pretend that it needed dividing in half. Reinforce the fold by keeping one of the triangular corners I’d created clamped in my left hand so I could run the thumb and index finger of my right hand along the nascent crease until I reached the end. This made a nice crease.

  I felt that this elaborate display was sufficient cover for not glancing right away at my dinner companion.

  I looked up at her, assuming that Angie would have her eyes glued to my face so she could gauge my reaction to her announcement. Instead, her attention was on the tortilla chips that had come with the enchiladas. This was the over familiarity demon at work again.

  She offered me the bag. I took a few, grateful for the diversion. Not that I’d needed more than a second or two to work out the implications of her offhand comment about the warehouse. I’d not mentioned the warehouse to her. Our phone conversation had been too brief. Our texting had dealt only with her travel schedule.

  The assistant fire marshal and I had agreed to keep any mention of it off social media for now, and there had been no news coverage yet. The conclusion was unavoidable. She wasn’t dependent on me for her information about Flagler’s freakish outbreak of criminality and chaos. Not all of it anyway. She had her own sources.

  But then, why not? — she was a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Who knew what else she’d told her colleagues in Washington. Or the full extent of what she knew about what was happening in Flagler. My next thought brought an involuntary flinch to my shoulders. Or whether she was one of the people that a presidential envoy was on his way to Flagler to warn me about?

  In those few moments, it dawned on me how naive I’d been.

  This beguiling creature I was sharing enchiladas with had more ways to cover up secrets — and to uncover them — than Carter’s has liver pills. More ways than I had in my little boondocks satchel of crime-fighting resources. More than I’d ever have.

  Rather than keep her from knowing my secrets, I’d be advised to see how many of hers she’d be willing to share. But I didn’t have to probe for the next one. She volunteered it right before she hopped off her bar stool. She was getting up to put the enchiladas and tortilla chips back in the oven. She did that kind of thing a lot. She liked her cold foods well chilled and her hot foods well heated. And she liked the world around her to offer endless variety and intrigue.

  The flight to Flagler had provided some, she noted after returning to her perch and reaching for the hot sauce bottle. “You expecting a secret super-sleuth from Dallas or somewhere?”

  This time, she did shoot me a glance. Then she put the hot sauce bottle down with a solid thump without releasing her grip on it. Swiveled back and forth a couple of times on her stool while hanging onto it, never once removing her unblinking eyes from my blank face. “Oh, boy. I’ve stepped in it, haven’t I?”

  That was when she told me about the strange guy she’d sat next to on the plane.

  * * *

  I wasn’t going to mention the call from the president. And I knew she wasn’t going to resurrect the subject of strange visitors to Flagler. There was plenty else to talk about. She needed a cue, so I gave her one. “Your trip was sudden.”

  Angie seemed relieved at my new choice of conversation topic. “The murders of all those physicists is a bigger deal than you may have realized.”

  I asked her to clarify that remark. “America’s short of physicists?”

  As usual, she gave me a history lesson. “Not short so much — although there never seem to be enough big bang chasers around to satisfy the Department of Defense. It’s more that America is paranoid about what happens to its physicists. Has been ever since the Manhattan Project.”

  I felt the moment could use a little coyness. “And your bosses thought ten physicists reduced to bones in the Texas badlands meant — what? The Russians had landed?”

  My flippant comment irritated her. Or so I’d thought. Turned out it was something else. “The Russians
would never expect to find anything of interest in Texas.”

  I reached for her hand. And scrambled for the right words. “Mea culpa. I’m beginning to sense that all was not peace and light for you on this trip to J. Edgar Hoover land.”

  “There were tensions.”

  “So you walked into a hornet’s nest of spook-think about our dead physicists?”

  She continued to scowl. “That’s the thing. If ten physicists had been murdered in the northeast, say, or California, the bureau’s brass would be glued to their computer screens and smartphones. And willing to kill for a chance to talk with an agent fresh from the scene. But this didn’t happen. They acted like these guys went bird hunting out in the Texas sticks then celebrated overmuch with some bad hillbilly hooch or something and died from it.”

  “You told them we have CSI teams and medical examiners out west of the Brazos?”

  The momentum she gave the hot sauce bottle carried it to the far end of the counter. “Nope. Wasn’t that circumspect. Told them if they ever came to Flagler to bring toilet paper so they wouldn’t have to use corn cobs.”

  “Bet that got a laugh.”

  “Well, it did after I explained what else a corn cob could be used for.”

  That got a laugh out of me. Then our conversation got serious again. “You went to D.C. wanting something.”

  Angie did a complete whirl on her swivel stool. Stopped herself by grabbing the edge of the countertop. “Look.” She raised both hands, ready to count off something on her fingers.

  “We have thirty-five thousand employees in the bureau. The CIA has twenty-two thousand. The Drug Enforcement Administration, eleven thousand. The Secret Service, seven thousand. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, five thousand. The IRS’s Criminal Investigation Division, twenty-five hundred.” Then she seemed to realize she needed to lighten her tone. “I just wanted a little help for a really terrific sheriff in a nice little West Central Texas city and his ditzy FBI special agent girlfriend.”