by Colin Kersey
I nodded. I thought it sounded more than fair, even if I had not consciously put the knife in the dishwasher blade up.
“I like the work you’ve done so far. No one can say you don’t put in a full eight hours and then some. Other than that mess with the John Deere getting caught in the soup, you’ve shown yourself to be a hard worker, someone who doesn’t spend half their time complaining.
“Now I know you didn’t mean to mire that tractor or hurt Valerie, but you can’t be making mistakes like that around here without seriously injuring somebody sooner or later, maybe even yourself.” He paused. “Tell me something. Did you have anything to do with your wife getting killed? Was you driving the car she was in?”
Virgil’s suspicion—no matter how misplaced—mortified me so that my ears burned, and the roots of my hair twitched.
“No!”
“I didn’t think so, but with everything that’s going on, I had to ask,” Virgil said.
“Jesus, Virgil,” I said, but Virgil put up a hand to cut me off. We entered the tree line and stood at the edge of a large, musty-smelling mound of compost.
“You’ll get your chance to speak in a moment, after you hear the rest of what I’ve got to say. I’ll make it short and sweet. You can leave today. Come up to the house and I’ll write you a check for the entire month, even though you only worked a few days. Or you can choose to stay. But if you do, you got to promise me there ain’t going to be any more mistakes. Because anything more goes wrong and, so help me, I will not ask questions, I will just fire you. Understood?”
I stared at the ground.
“So, which is it?” Virgil asked.
Humiliated by Virgil’s reprimand, I was tempted to throw my few things into the back of the Toyota and drive off. But, as I had determined just a few days earlier, I did not have anywhere else to go. And besides, failure made a lousy traveling companion.
“I’m staying.”
“Then let me give you one more additional piece of advice. You might be smarter than Stu. You might even be a faster, better fighter, though I would bet against it. But he is my son-in-law and, for better or worse, as long as my daughter is married to him, he calls the shots. So, to the best of your ability, stay out of his way. Don’t go stirring up trouble or you won’t be doing either of us any favors. I have to cut him a little slack because he’s family. I don’t have any reason to do the same for you. You get my meaning?”
“Sure.”
“Good.” Virgil surprised me by clapping me on the back. “Then you best get back to sweeping if you aim to get done before the weekend.”
“Thanks,” I said. We began walking back up the hill. “Valerie is going to be okay?”
“She’ll get by. Going to slow down her viola-playing for a while though. And dinners might be frozen food for a few days.”
“I can cook.”
Virgil looked over his shoulder at me. “You’re just full of surprises, ain’t you?”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
As crime boss Whitey Bulger and his wife had proved, with its agglomeration of immigrants, indigenes, and transients, one could abide in relative anonymity in Southern California. People drove in and out of their garages without ever seeing or knowing their neighbors. Unless you belonged to the same gym, shopped in the same grocery store, or exercised your pooch in the same park, you might never see the same person twice in a decade—or maybe even a lifetime. Conversely, I had forgotten what it was like to live in a small town where everybody knew everybody else’s business, the more sordid, the better. Once you got the hang of it, knew who to go to, and—most important—how to ask a question without appearing to want to know the answer, there was almost nothing you could not find out.
Saturday morning at the Van de Zilver household was a culinary disaster. Nauseous from pain medication, Valerie retired to her room with Patsy, leaving Vonda bleary-eyed and grouchy in the kitchen.
“Why are you still here?” she shouted at me from the smoke-encircled stove where bacon was being cremated. “Haven’t you caused enough trouble for this family? Who is your next target?”
“Careful, Von,” Stu said. “He has probably booby-trapped the garbage disposal.”
After offering to help make breakfast and being turned down, I excused myself and drove down the hill to Sedro-Woolley. In addition to wanting to review the photos stored on the camera chip, I hoped to find information at the local library on raising trout and, if I was lucky, something about Cayman Islands’ banks. I was due for a haircut and I had a list of items to buy for dinner. But first, I needed to find a place to eat and salvage what crumbs were left of my peace of mind.
Annie’s Homestyle Country Cooking was humming with customers. Whenever the door opened, an enticing smell of vanilla and cinnamon would escape. I had to hover on the sidewalk for over ten minutes before hearing my name called and getting a table. The wait gave me an opportunity to observe the entire eight blocks of Metcalf Street, which constituted the center of downtown and was bustling with cars, trucks, and people. Several vehicles sported Canadian license plates with their prominent maple leaf. In addition to the freeway, the street was linked to the North Cascade Highway which meant the frequent traffic of visitors seeking gas and a rest stop mingled with the occasional diesel chatter of logging trucks. Finding a parking place took speed, courage, and no small amount of luck.
Once I was seated, it was another ten minutes before the server arrived to pour coffee and take my order. Her hair was magenta and black, she wore a black top and pants that matched her nails, and her ears bore enough earrings, plus one safety pin, to launch a kiosk jewelry business. Her slippered feet were tattooed with opposing Asian cats and cherry blossoms. Her name badge identified the woman as the owner, Annie.
“What’s going on today in town?” I asked after ordering.
“First day of our tulip festival. Where you from, Jupiter?” With that, she disappeared.
“Seriously, where are you from?” she asked when she appeared several minutes later with a plate-sized stack of Swedish pancakes. Annie’s obviously had not yet heard about portion control. “You don’t sound like you’re from the provinces. Please don’t say you’re from California.”
“What’s wrong with people from California?” I whispered. It was highly unlikely that a member of the Sinaloa Cartel was having breakfast at Annie’s in Sedro-Woolley this morning, but I saw no reason to test the odds.
“Number one: they’re rude; think they’re so smart with their Porches, pinot noir, and skinny-assed girlfriends.” She blew the hair that had fallen into her eyes. “Second, they spend too much money on homes around here which makes it impossible for us locals to ever hope to own anything.”
With a flick of her fingers, she disappeared into the kitchen. While heads at a few surrounding tables turned to see who the latest carpetbagger was, I focused on breakfast.
The pancakes were incredibly thin and the lingonberries that covered them tasted both sweet and tart and I decided I would be eating here Saturday mornings for the rest of my life, or until the Surgeon General shut the place down as a health hazard. Then I recalled how much Heide enjoyed finding such places and how she even fantasized about starting her own café. A carved “Heide’s Cafe” sign had hung above our kitchen window, a fact I had forgotten until now.
“What’s the matter?” Annie asked. “Something wrong with the food?”
I realized I had been staring at the food without eating. “No, it’s great. I just zoned out for a minute. Sorry.”
She refilled my coffee cup. “Don’t mind me being so nosy. Being curious helps relieve the boredom,” she said. “Besides, it’s obvious you’re not from California.
For a half-second, I thought she was talking about my race. But then she added, “Your boots are dirty.”
I decided to ease her mind. Besides, I was enjoying her opinionated commentary. “I work up at the Van de Zilver place. Know it?”
“Course I do. You can’t gr
ow up here and run a restaurant without knowing everybody in the Skagit Valley. How’s Vonda doing? She still married to that asshole, Stu? Tell her Annie said ‘Hi. We should go have fun some night. That’s if I can ever find a babysitter old enough to look after my boys and young enough not to be smokin’ weed or shooting up.’”
Later, as another young woman approached with a coffee pot, Annie intercepted her. “I got this one.”
I noted the hand-drawn smiley face and “Come again” on the bill she left behind.
After paying and leaving a modest tip from the small amount of cash that remained from my impromptu retreat north, I darted through the traffic to the Cascade Mountain Loans and Pawn Shop to have a look around. There were the usual guitars, stereos, a few guns in a glass display case, and a battered sword of undetermined age. A gun might be a good thing to have, I considered, if the cartel showed up someday. Unfortunately, it would be impossible for me to buy one without legitimate identification.
There was also a bookcase filled with cameras, nearly all of them old and coated with dust. I spotted a Speed Graflex, the kind every reporter carried over fifty years ago when life was black and white and slow enough to use a tripod. On a whim, I asked how much it was.
“Let you have it for thirty-five,” the proprietor said. He was a large man, over six-feet tall and at least three hundred pounds, which explained the wide aisles in the small store. “You a collector?”
“Nah. Thought I might take up photography.”
“You won’t have much luck taking photos with that. Even if the bellows weren’t cracked and the lens scratched, I don’t think you’ll find film for it anywhere.”
“That’s okay. I’ll take it.” Preserving precious memories was not likely to be high on my priority list anytime soon. “What about a tripod? Got anything that will work?”
“Let me get this straight: you want a tripod for a camera that doesn’t work?” The big man studied me for a moment as if deciding whether I was crazy, dangerous, or both. Then he held up a finger. “Give me a minute.”
He disappeared for a few minutes into the back of the shop. When he reappeared, he was breathing hard and carrying a telescoping tripod with one of the thumbscrews missing. “You could tape it,” he said.
“How much?”
I could almost hear the wheels turning as the other man considered this. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll give you both the camera and the tripod for forty-five.”
“All right.”
The other man stared at me. “Ain’t you even going to try to chisel me down none?”
“Forgot my chisel.”
The man let out something between a chuckle and a wheeze. “Let me clean it up for you.” He pulled a handkerchief out of his rear pocket and used it to wipe the camera off. “That looks a little better.” Then he did the same with the tripod.
“Where you from?” he asked.
“I work up at the Van de Zilver place.”
“You work with Stu Follett?”
“You know Stu?”
“See him down at the Schooner now-and-then having lunch with that real estate fellow who has his picture posted all over town. Sometimes he brings stuff in here. Other times, he buys. Mostly, he looks. Stu’s quite a collector.”
“What’s he collect?” I felt a little embarrassed like I was snooping through somebody’s closet, but I was curious, too. And the way I looked at it, living in a small town was like having free access to a marketing research department.
“Yessir.” He made it sound like one word. “Got quite a baseball card collection. Guess maybe you seen it?”
“I just started working there.”
He nodded. “Are you sure I can’t interest you in something else—a TV that don’t work, maybe?” He wheezed.
“This ought to do it. By the way, know where I can find a pet store?”
Beads of sweat had formed on his massive brow and he wiped it with the dirty handkerchief, leaving a muddy streak. “Nothing’ like that in town. You might try the Skagit Valley Mall in Burlington.”
“How about a library?”
“Head six or seven blocks east on Metcalf and turn right. You can’t miss it.”
A few hours later, I had accomplished most of what I had set out to do, including learning that there were 269 banks in the Cayman Islands. A young male librarian helped me print out a list.
Finding the photo that I searched for on the tiny camera memory card took only seconds. As I scanned the thumbnails on one of the library’s computers, I quickly located the snapshot taken the moment before Heide saw me and closed her laptop. It was the last photo I had taken before removing the chip. Even though I had worked with photographic images nearly every day in college when I was studying to be an art director, I was still amazed by the amount of data the Canon digital camera had captured in a thousandth of a second. There in the kitchen shadows were Heide’s lovely back with its smooth, pale skin and the rear of her head with its red mane. There too was her glowing laptop screen, still open, with the bank logo, username, and an eight-digit password disguised by asterisks.
I felt a cord tighten around my heart as I stared at the photo, remembering our last few days and hours together. I did not hear the librarian approach until he was standing right behind me.
“What’s that a photo of?” he asked.
“Oh, hi,” I said, wiping a tear away before he noticed. “Just an outtake from a camera I used to have.”
“What happened to the camera?”
“Stolen,” I said.
“Well, at least you still have the memory card.”
Before heading back to the trout farm, I decided there was time to check out the tulip festival that Annie had mentioned. After driving a few miles north on the freeway, I exited Highway 20, crossed under the freeway, and stopped for fuel using some of the last of my cash at a combination gas-station-convenience-sporting-goods store where a sign in the window advertised “Fresh Bait, Ammo, Espresso.”
When I had driven up from Seattle earlier in the week, I had been too preoccupied with pain, grief, and the urgency of finding the Van de Zilver farm to spend time observing the countryside. Now, I had traveled only a few miles across the flat, alluvial valley when the housing developments and strip malls suddenly faded away and the land unwound into sprawling farms, one enormous grid after another, each anchored by a two-story, Victorian farmhouse, surrounded by a few poplar trees and a much-weathered barn, sometimes leaning, or slowly collapsing in upon itself, wooden ships tacking in a sea of furrowed soil.
I turned onto one two-lane country road after another, seeking tulip fields. I had already noted two or three promising locations where cars lined the roads and clumps of people wandered among the rows for picture-taking when I rounded a corner and came upon hundreds of acres of flowers in dazzling rows of purple, lavender, scarlet, white, yellow, gold and orange set against the backdrop of a tall, snow-covered peak. I removed the camera from the truck and carried it and the tripod to the edge of the field where I set it up. Then I stood there, admiring the orderly banquet of color spread before me and, without consciously thinking about it, knowing where I would crop, where I would add fill lights, and what would need retouching if I were directing a film crew.
Observing life through the viewfinder of an old black and white camera was a lot like advertising, I reflected. The consumer sees only what has been carefully edited for them to see: a staged set under artificial lights, a couple of good-looking models, the ad or commercial later retouched on the computer so that there is nothing to remind you of the ugliness of real life. No dents, blemishes, or bruises. No graffiti, gangs, or homeless people. No pedophiles, serial killers, or suicide bombers. One hundred percent artificial.
Occasionally, another car would pull over and a couple would get out and snap a photo or stand for a minute or two. Once, an entire busload of Japanese tourists, older folks mostly, unloaded nearby, the men wearing cameras around their necks, the women carr
ying cell phones or cameras, and all of them dressed alike. They waded like children, chatting, and laughing noisily, posing for each other among the rows of flowers.
I grew tired and hungry as the day progressed but could not find the will to leave. An emotion I could not describe rooted me to the place long after my fellow admirers had dwindled and finally ceased coming. A breeze arrived, blowing the blossoms, row upon row, like waves.
I kicked at a dirt clod. “Wish you could see this, Heide.” I smiled cheerlessly. A knot had found its way into my throat.
The sun began to sink in the sky behind me, burnishing the fields, hills, and mountains with amber light.
“You lied to me. You said you were working late to get a promotion, not to steal a fortune.” I glanced up at the snow-covered mountain, now a dome of fire. “Damn you,” I whispered. Then louder, “Damn you!”
I did not hear the couple with their little girl chased by a black and white dog until the woman spoke, “Pretty, ain’t it?”
I saw that the man’s right arm and hand were prosthetic. “Magnificent,” I replied, my voice husky.
“We saw you taking pictures from the house. You from a magazine or newspaper?”
I shook my head. The dog spotted a seagull that had landed some distance ahead and he raced after it, the girl following on his heels.
“What kind of film is that you’re using?” the man asked. He had a beard that wrapped around his jawline, leaving his cheeks and upper lip hairless. I was reminded of a young Captain Ahab.
“Film? Why, black and white. Silly isn’t it? All this unbelievable color and here I am shooting black and white film. Is all of this your handiwork?”
The woman smiled. “We just tend the fields, but the flowers, those are His grace.”
“Doesn’t it ever trouble you,” I said, “the fact that they’re so temporary?”
“Not at all,” she said. “That’s what makes them so beautiful. I’m not saying a mountain lake isn’t beautiful in its own way. But there is something special about tulips. If you were to drive by here just a few weeks ago, there was nothing here but plant stalks. Today, there’s this bountiful display of color.” She waved her arm in the direction of the splendor. “You want a photo of heaven, I believe this is what it looks like. Up here, the Rapture comes every spring.”