Into the Frying Pan

by Sarah Osborne

  “I’m supposed to make sure you’re okay, not that you guys need that from me. Did you look at Andy’s cut?” I asked Frank.

  “Yeah. It’s superficial.”

  “I’m fine, Ditie,” Andy said. “No internal or external injuries, except the cut, and it’s not bleeding anymore. I can’t believe you’re here. I heard you’d come back to Atlanta and I kept intending to look you up, but this is a terrible way for us to meet again.” He ran his hand through his red hair repeatedly. It was like a nervous tic, and I remembered it from med school whenever we were about to take a test.

  “I guess you two would know if you’d been hurt,” I said.

  “Yes, we’re fine,” Frank said. “I don’t know if you remember me. I was a year ahead, a friend of Phil’s.”

  “Sure, I remember you,” I said. “Where are you now?”

  “Upstate New York. I have a busy internal medicine practice near Ithaca.”

  I glanced at Danny to see if he was looking in my direction. He wasn’t, so I did what he told me not to do and asked a question. “What do you think happened?”

  “The whole god-damned gun exploded,” Frank said. “It’s a miracle we weren’t all killed.”

  I nodded and moved on to Sally Cutter. She was standing alone, staring at the other side of the cannon.

  I followed her gaze. Carl lay on his back. I couldn’t see more than an outline of his body, and the EMTs made sure no one came any closer.

  She looked at me and pushed her short dark hair out of her eyes. It took her a moment to focus. “Phil said you might come today.”

  She spoke as if we were meeting at a casual gathering. People react to sudden death in all kinds of ways. I imagined she was still in shock.

  “Are you all right” I asked. “Do you want to sit down?”

  She didn’t seem to hear me. “Carl was the only one on that side of the cannon. The rest of us knew to turn our backs before the cannon was fired, but Carl didn’t know that. Phil didn’t explain that to him.”

  “Please,” I said, “let me make sure you’re okay.” I led her unresisting away from the view of Carl’s body. I checked her out. She was a tiny thing, as she’d always been, sprite-like literally and figuratively. She still looked more like a child than an adult. She shook her head, no, when I asked if she’d been knocked unconscious, and her short black hair fell back into its pixie cut.

  “You do know everyone here hated Carl—Phil most of all,” she said. “They stopped speaking second year.” Sally paused. “After the cheating scandal.”

  “I didn’t know much about that, but that was ages ago. Surely, they’d put that behind them.”

  “I don’t think so. Phil let Carl come to the reenactment because Phil’s dad insisted on it. Carl’s working for him now.”

  That information stunned me. “Why? Carl hated the South. Why would he possibly be working for Phil’s dad?”

  “I’ll tell you the whole story over a drink sometime. Phil wasn’t happy about it, not one bit. He wanted Carl out of the picture, and now he is. Permanently.”

  “Are you suggesting something about the accident, Sally?”

  “How do we know it was an accident? Phil inspected the cannons. Why didn’t he see something was wrong with this one?”

  “You can’t possibly be saying Phil orchestrated this.”

  “Think about it,” Sally said. “Phil hates Carl and lets him pull the lanyard. That’s a big deal. Carl is the only one on the side of the cannon that explodes.”

  Before I could respond, a deputy sheriff from Gordon County arrived and spoke with the EMTs near the body. Then he began closing off the area with stakes and the infamous yellow tape. A few minutes later another officer arrived who apparently knew Danny. He introduced himself to us as a Gordon County investigator, Officer Barden. He was a small man with a no-nonsense expression and the most intense blue eyes I’d ever seen. “You both here at the time of the explosion?” he asked Sally and me.

  I shook my head.

  “Then I’ll ask you to leave, miss. Stay near the tents, and someone will question you later.”

  I did as I was told. As I walked up the hill toward the tents, my cell rang.

  “Are you okay?” Mason asked. “Danny called me.”

  “I’m fine, but a classmate is dead—Carl Thompson.”

  “Yes, I heard. Sounds like a terrible accident,” Mason said.

  “At least one person here isn’t so sure it was an accident,” I said. I told him briefly what Sally had said.

  “Sally Cutter thinks Phil might have killed the guy over a feud from a decade ago?” Mason asked.

  “The feud might be more current,” I said. “Carl was working for Phil’s father. When I last spoke to Phil four months ago, he was considering taking over his father’s concierge business and didn’t say one word about Carl working there.”

  “Concierge business?” Mason asked.

  “You know—the VIP service where your doctor is always available. You pay an annual fee for that. It’s popular these days.”

  “Are you saying what I think you are—that Phil would have hated the idea of Carl working for his father and may have doctored the cannon, no pun intended?”

  “I’m not sure what I’m saying. I can’t imagine Phil committing murder, and frankly I can’t imagine he’d do anything to mess with his precious reenactments.”

  “Leave it, Ditie. The right people are there to figure out what happened.”

  We hung up and I called my supervisor Vic at the refugee clinic. She took the information in stride.

  “I just heard about it on the news,” she said. “I can’t believe you saw it happen.”

  “I can’t either. I was calling to see if you might need me this afternoon. I’ll be better off at the clinic than trying to act like nothing happened with eagle-eyed Lucie hovering around me.”

  I waited half an hour until a police officer took my statement and said I was free to go. It was a relief to leave, and I didn’t realize I was still in shock until I drove away from the scene. I only saw Carl’s body from a distance, but it was enough to take me back to the image of Ellie lying in the morgue.

  Everything about the night of her death washed over me. The anger I felt that Ellie hadn’t called the children to say good night. The shock of hearing a detective’s voice saying he needed to speak to me, and then the overpowering wish that the woman shot to death would not be Ellie but some stranger. For weeks afterwards I woke up at night with a start, seeing her face torn apart by a gunshot wound. It took me most of the hour on the road to clear my head of the picture of Ellie’s lifeless face.

  A bustling afternoon in the clinic did the rest. I worked nonstop from four to six thirty. Many of the refugees could only come on Saturday, so we had extended hours. We didn’t have interpreters on site on the weekend. We could get one on the phone, but fortunately we didn’t have to do that. We did wellness checks and shots for school, which would be starting in early August.

  I got home before seven to find Mason sitting on the porch swing watching the kids play in the yard with Hermione. He jumped up and gave me a warm hug. “I fed the kids, I hope that’s okay.”

  “More than okay.”

  “I’m glad you’re all right,” he whispered in my ear.

  I gave each of the kids a hug and looked around for Lurleen.

  “I sent her home,” Mason said. “She was eager to be there when Danny got back. They’ll be coming over later.”

  Lucie and Jason roughhoused with Hermione in the grass while she licked their faces. Lucie tried to shove her away and pushed Jason instead. He squawked and shoved her back.

  “Hey,” I shouted. “Knock it off. It was an accident.”

  Jason wrapped his arms around himself. “You always take her side, just cause she’s a girl!”

&nbs
p; “Really? What do you say, Mason? You saw the whole thing.”

  “I say it’s Hermione’s fault, and she didn’t do it on purpose.”

  “Agreed. So are you two safe out here with the dog?” I asked.

  It was meant to be a joke, but Lucie gave me a serious look and nodded her head. I walked over and pulled her blond ponytail gently. “I was teasing you,” I said, “but maybe you could give Mason and me ten minutes of private time. I’ll bring out a pitcher of water, and if you get too warm come inside.”

  Lucie ran into the house and returned ten seconds later with a notebook.

  She took Jason’s hand. “Come on, Jason. I’m sorry I shoved you. We’ll sit inside the magnolia tree and I’ll read you one of my stories—you can be the star in it.”

  I’d already put two small chairs near the root of the tree inside the circle of its glorious branches. It was the perfect place for storytelling.

  Mason followed me to the kitchen as far away from curious ears as we could get. He waited while I carried the ice water and glasses outside. When I returned, he looked at me expectantly. I settled on a stool across from him, my hands on the cool marble island.

  “Has Danny filled you in about any of it?” I asked.

  “You both said a man died when a cannon exploded—someone you knew in med school.”

  “Yes. Carl Thompson. I can’t believe it even now.”

  “Neither can anyone else apparently,” Mason said. “If Brockton is telling the truth, Carl wasn’t supposed to pull the lanyard—Phil was. His story is that Thompson begged him to let him do it, so he did.”

  “Phil thinks he was the target?” I asked.

  “Yes, if it wasn’t an accident and if your old boyfriend is telling the truth.”

  My heart thudded to a stop. “You think he’s lying?”

  “Danny wonders if he might be. Did he say any more to you?”

  Before I could answer, Phil called me on my cell. He didn’t give me time to say a word.

  “Ditie, I’m in real trouble. You have to help me out. You have to.”

  “Did they arrest you? Do you need bail? Surely your father is helping you?”

  “No to all of that. I’m back in my hotel for now—the Whitley in Buckhead. Can you come over?”

  “What’s this all about?”

  “That guy, that investigator Barden, kept interviewing me like I’d done something on purpose to the cannon, like it wasn’t an accident. I have to stay in town for now and see them at their office tomorrow morning. I have to get my head straight. You’ve always helped me do that.”

  “I can’t help you right now, Phil. We’ll talk later. What you need is a bath, a drink and sleep. I’ll try to stop by tomorrow.”

  I hung up while Mason looked at me, one eyebrow raised. “You’ll stop by tomorrow?”

  I put my elbows on the island, my head between my hands, and stared at Mason.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I asked.

  “Why would you get involved with him again? He dumped you.”

  “I know, Mason, I was there.” I paused. “I’ll go because he said he needed my help.”

  “Maybe Phil Brockton isn’t as innocent as you’d like to believe. Apparently Brockton told the police about his long-standing feud with Thompson.”

  “I’m glad he did. He’d never have admitted that if he’d been involved with Carl’s death.”

  “Unless your boyfriend was sure the police would find out about it eventually.”

  “Ex-boyfriend.” Mason was starting to annoy me. “I loved Phil once. I don’t love him now.”

  “You may not love him, but what are his feelings about you? You’re the person he runs to when he’s in trouble.”

  “Phil doesn’t love me. He’s asking for my help because I’ve always been the one to bail him out of trouble.”

  “And does he get in trouble a lot?”

  “No.” I got up from the island and walked over to the sink to pour myself a glass of water and clear my head. Mason was acting in a way I’d never seen before.

  “Look, Mason. I don’t love Phil. I love you. End of story. Phil never got into any serious trouble, but when he needed my help I gave it. If he went out with the boys and got drunk, I picked him up and tucked him in bed.”

  Mason took a deep breath and his tone became more cop-like. “You know why Brockton and Carl Thompson disliked each other so much?”

  “Phil is a ‘good old boy’ from way back. He’s a fourth-generation Southern doc. His great, great, great grandfather fought in the Civil War. Phil lives and breathes the life of a Southern gentleman. That was one reason I was so shocked when he went to New York.

  “He and Carl couldn’t have been more different. Carl was from New Jersey, turned up his nose at our medical school, and always made cracks about Southerners, their lazy habits, their crazy accents.”

  “You think that’s why they became bitter enemies?”

  I shook my head.

  “No. It was something more than that. Something that happened in med school second year. Suddenly they weren’t speaking, even to slam each other with insults. Phil wouldn’t tell me about it, but there were a lot of things he didn’t tell me about.” I sighed. “None of that makes me believe he could kill a man in cold blood. This whole thing has to be a terrible accident.”

  “It may be.”

  Mason took my hand and squeezed it. He rubbed his other hand over his face.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve been hard on you about Phil. I worry you may want someone younger than me, a wealthy doctor perhaps.”

  “Mason, sometimes I wonder what you see when you look in the mirror. I see the man of my dreams. I couldn’t imagine loving anyone else.”

  Mason wrapped his arms around me and kissed me. The next thing we heard was a loud giggle. I thought it was from Lucie but it wasn’t.

  Lurleen and Danny stood inside my kitchen, their heads tilted to one side as if they were studying a work of art.

  “Très jolie. Don’t stop on our account,” Lurleen said. “We just came in to get something to drink.”

  It was impossible not to smile when those two walked in a room.

  Danny was five years younger than Lurleen, but he could barely keep up with her. They made a striking couple. Danny, sandy blond hair with the body of a linebacker, and gorgeous Lurleen, tall, thin, auburn-haired.

  Lurleen glanced around the kitchen. “I know it’s been a terrible day for you, but we still have to eat, and cooking always calms you down. What’s for dinner, chérie?” She sniffed. “I don’t smell anything delicious.”

  I glanced at my watch. “I haven’t had time to think about dinner.”

  “You want us to go home?” Lurleen asked.

  “No, not at all. Could you bring the kids inside? Mason fed them, but I need to get them ready for bed.”

  “They were inside when we came, watching TV in the family room.”

  I wondered how much they might have heard of the conversation Mason and I were having.

  The four of us settled in the living room and closed the door to the family room while Lucie and Jason watched the end of Diary of a Wimpy Kid 4.

  Danny told us what he knew about the day.

  Lurleen listened with rapt attention as Danny described Phil’s situation. She’d known Phil from med school and never liked him much. She thought I deserved better.

  “Poor guy,” Danny said. “They’ve closed down the reenactment for the rest of the day and probably for tomorrow as well. These guys spend their entire year getting ready for their battles and to have one shut down, that’s rough.”

  “Not as rough as it was for Carl,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know,” Danny said. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s just a big deal for the guys that are really into it.”

  �
�That would be Phil,” I said. “Even in med school he took his vacations so he could participate in reenactments, and everything had to be authentic. Everything! He’s sewn his grandfather’s buttons on his jacket.”

  “I’ve always wanted to participate,” Danny said. “Either side.”

  “With your Southern accent, they’d assume you were a spy if you fought for the North,” I said.

  “Danny knows everything about the Civil War,” Lurleen said. “Maybe he could help with the investigation.”

  “I know the investigator—Doug Barden,” Danny said. “He’s a competent guy. He won’t need my help, but I do have a thought. If the reenactment is on for Sunday, I could infiltrate the group.”

  I could see his eyes sparkling.

  “If you go, I’m going with you,” Lurleen said. “You’ve already told me some women went to battle dressed as men.”

  “You looking like a man, Lurleen? That would take some work,” Danny said with a grin.

  “I think you’re all getting ahead of yourselves,” Mason said. “If it’s deemed an accident, then you won’t need to go undercover, Dan.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. Of course, it was an accident. It had to be an accident!

  Lucie stuck her head into the living room. “The movie’s over. Are you done with your grown-up talk?”

  “Done,” I said. “But it’s late and you two need a bath.”

  Lurleen jumped up. “I’ll help Jason.”

  While the children bathed, I fixed a quick meal of summer pasta and tossed salad for the grown-ups.

  The kids joined us in their pajamas and nibbled on what was their favorite dinner in the world.

  I looked around at my family and best friends. Despite what a horrible day it had been, I was in fact a lucky woman. No one, not even my mother, perhaps especially my mother, could have believed my good fortune. I was sorry she wasn’t alive to see it and wondered if she would have become a better grandmother to my children than she’d been a mother to me.

  A sadness caught me off guard as I thought about Dad dying of cancer before he even knew I went to medical school, much less had children of my own. The sadness passed as quickly as it came. I hoped he was somewhere smiling at my perfect life.