Make Haste Slowly

by Amy K Rognlie

  I nodded. “Earl will tell Rick, and Rick will tell Lonnie. I bet she’ll tell me.”

  “Honey, Lonnie Holloway couldn’t keep a secret if her life depended on it.” Aunt Dot chuckled. “When I had that girl in second grade, I knew who to talk to if I wanted to find out what really happened on the playground. I can’t believe she ended up being married to the town mayor!”

  Sometimes I forgot that my aunt had lived here in Short Creek her entire life. I met Lonnie after I moved down here, but I viewed her, as Anne Shirley of Green Gables would say, as a “kindred spirit.” The Lonnie I knew must have come a long way since second grade, because she sure wasn’t the type of person to betray anyone’s confidence. In fact, she seemed to me to be the perfect role model of a godly wife and mother, and was the leader of our early-morning Friday prayer group. Lonnie, Celia, Karen, and I made up the main group, with a few others who joined us when they could.

  I think Lonnie would probably be able to give me inside information on something this important, especially since she knew me well enough to know that I wasn’t going to be posting it all over social media or discussing it with everyone in the world.

  Mona cleared her throat and glanced at the clock.

  “I hope you get a lot of…typing…done, Aunt Dot.” I stood. “I’ll come by again soon, once I get the Dorsey wedding done, okay?”

  “Well, I think you should email me and let me know if you hear any news.” Her eyes twinkled like they did when she had a secret.

  Email her?

  “You do email now?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” She gave me a sassy smile. “I told you, Brandon’s been teaching us all kinds of technology stuff. Tomorrow we’re going to learn how to organize our inboxes! I’m so excited!”

  Mona grabbed my arm the minute we got out into the hall. “Callie! There was one of those anchor dolphin thingies on one of those envelopes!” she hissed.

  “What?”

  “One of those, you know, Latin things. Like was in the gift bag.” She raised her eyebrows at my apparent dimwittedness. “The mystery box? You know, yesterday?”

  The festina lente symbol?

  “Really?”

  Her flag-striped nails tapping furiously, she pulled up the picture on her phone. “Look! It’s partly covered by the envelope on top of it, but you can still kind of see it.”

  She was right.

  I sucked in my breath. Had one of Dot’s prison inmate friends gotten hold of my information and was trying to send me some kind of message? But why? And if so, how would a prison inmate be able to send me a box of stuff?

  I felt a headache coming on. “I have got to finish those flower arrangements today, or I’m sunk,” I said. “Maybe we’ll have more answers once I can talk to Lonnie.”

  As it turned out, I didn’t even need to talk to Lonnie. Houston popped into the shop as I tied the last bow on the bridesmaids’ bouquets. The bouquets were the most awful things I’d ever seen, but they were exactly like the photo the bride had shown me on Pinterest. Tightly-packed round balls of orange-hued roses, with fake Monarch butterflies fluttering ridiculously above the flowers. Yeesh. I was afraid to see what the bridesmaids’ dresses looked like.

  “You still working?” Houston called as the screen door banged behind him. “Oops, sorry.” He turned around to make sure it had closed all the way.

  I need to get that thing fixed. It screeched every time someone opened it.

  “Just finishing up.” I stood and stretched my back. How long had I been hunched over? And why was Houston wearing white athletic socks with his black dress pants?

  “What time is it?”

  He draped his handsome self over one of the stools behind my counter. “It’s eight. And I have good news and bad news for you.”

  I felt my heart rate accelerate instantly, and I hated it. For years, nothing much had rattled me. But since everything I had gone through with Kev and then those last super-stressful years before I moved down here, it seemed I was overly sensitive to anxiety.

  I took a deep breath. At least Houston had said good news and bad news. And he didn’t have on his funeral-preaching face. In fact, now that I looked closer, there appeared to be a twinkle lurking in those blue eyes.

  “Your corpse is not dead.” He paused dramatically. “And his name is Roger.”

  “What?”

  “The guy wasn’t dead, Callie.” He took a swig of his ever-present iced tea.

  I sank down on the stool next to him. “Is that the good news or the bad news?”

  He laughed. “That’s the good news. The bad news is that your friend Roger had absolutely nothing to do with the mysterious gift. So you still have a mystery on your hands.”

  The man was not dead?

  I felt my face flush hot as it always did when I was nervous or embarrassed. I was glad the man was alive, of course, but by now half the town would know that I had said I found a dead guy in my yard.

  I thought yesterday was complicated.

  “How did you find all of this out?” I asked faintly, hoping it wasn’t already all over social media. Did Houston even do social media? I guess I hadn’t ever thought about it.

  “Well, I was at the hospital and he had requested a visit. Of course, at the time, I didn’t know he was your corpse.”

  I rolled my eyes at him. I would never live this down, that was for sure. Plus, I had forgotten that besides pastoring First Church, Houston was a volunteer chaplain at the hospital in Temple.

  “He’s homeless.” Houston’s face sobered. “A trucker had picked him up somewhere in Dallas, and got him as far as Short Creek. He said he was trying to make his way down to Houston where his sister or somebody lives.”

  “But why—” I pictured the man again, lying still as death under my tree.

  “He was extremely dehydrated, and he is also diabetic. Sounds like his blood sugar had gone way out of control from not eating much for a couple of days.”

  I nodded.

  “He had been walking past your yard late last night and says he saw the package on your porch. By then, he was desperate, and hoped maybe there would be something in the bag he could eat.”

  Wow.

  “So…he just looked dead?”

  Houston shrugged. “I understand he was pretty close to meeting his Maker by the time you spotted him. The EMTs were able to at least keep him going until they got him to the hospital.” He looked at me curiously. “Did Todd tell you he was dead?”

  I replayed my short conversation with Todd Whitney, the captain of the volunteer fire department here in Short Creek. I wasn’t well acquainted with Todd, but we attended the same church, Short Creek Community Church. In fact, I had enjoyed hearing him speak when he had filled in for Pastor Brian during our adult Sunday school class last week. I could tell he had an extensive knowledge of the Bible.

  “Callie?”

  “Um…no, not really, I guess. After I first saw the guy’s body, I didn’t want to go into the store. Just in case, you know? So I waited in my van until Sheriff Earl and the deputy arrived. Then I walked with them up to the…up to him, then right away they told me to go into the shop. I didn’t want to watch anyway; you know?”

  He nodded.

  “But then, Todd knocked on the door to let me know they were loading him up and Earl would be around to question me later. I glanced over toward the ambulance, and the guy was completely covered with a sheet.” I shuddered. “I guess I don’t know much about these things, but I assumed if he was covered…”

  “A reasonable assumption,” Houston said easily.

  A reasonable assumption, I mused later on my way home from the store. But yet…I hadn’t been able to put my finger on it when I had been talking to Houston, but something didn’t feel right about this whole thing. It seemed too—silly. Too implausible. A homeless man is walking past my backyard, he happens to see a package right when he needs a snack…seems to be dead, but he actually isn’t…

  But he was.
Dead, I mean. He had to have been. I remembered the ants crawling over his face, the unnatural bloating—the ants!

  I called Houston. I felt a little weird about calling him. He and I were friends; but we weren’t really friends, like call-you-up-and-chat-about-things friends. But I had to know.

  He answered on the second ring. “Hello?”

  “Houston, it’s me, Callie.”

  “Callie! Are you okay?”

  “Yes, I’m fine,” I said.

  Why did he sound so concerned about me? We had seen each other ten minutes ago.

  “Uh, how did the guy look when you saw him in the hospital?

  There was a long pause. “You mean the homeless guy? Maybe a little pale.”

  “That’s all?”

  Houston exhaled loudly. “What else do you want to know? He was a normal, scraggly homeless guy.”

  A normal homeless guy? Somehow, “normal” and “homeless” didn’t go together in my brain. My brother, Jason, had sometimes been homeless as he struggled with addiction. During that time, I had found myself scanning the side of the road, the ditches, the street corners for his face whenever I drove through the streets of Columbus. Was he alive? Did he have enough to eat? Why wouldn’t he get help?

  Everyone who was homeless was someone’s brother. Or son. Or mother. If it wasn’t enough to deal with that in my own family, I had experienced the same heartbreak plenty of times as a school social worker. Poverty, addiction, mental illness…abuse… homelessness…it was all tied together.

  I dragged myself back to the present. “So he didn’t have any…marks…or anything on his face?”

  “Nope, none that I could see.”

  I could hear rattling and crunching, as if he was eating something out of a bag. “I thought you were doing the low-carb thing with Mona.” If he were my own pastor, I would never have teased him like that. But Houston was, well, Houston.

  He growled, and I could picture his sandy eyebrows scrunching together. I grinned.

  “Did you call me at ten o’clock at night to interrogate me? Or did you have another reason?” he asked. I heard the bag rattle again.

  “I’m sorry, Houston. But I think we need to talk about our mystery man again tomorrow if you have a minute.” For one thing, the man I had found beneath my crepe myrtle tree was not scraggly. Far from it.

  Chapter Five

  My friends at prayer group surprised me this morning with homemade cinnamon rolls for breakfast, since my birthday was in a couple of days. It was often a stretch for me to get up in time to be at Lonnie’s by six a.m. every Wednesday, but it was worth it. We took turns hosting the group; usually someone would host it for a month or two and then we’d switch to someone else’s house. I especially loved it when we met at Lonnie’s magazine-page-perfect home. It wasn’t only that her home was beautiful. It was the peace that I sensed there the minute I walked in the door, as if the Holy Spirit was very near.

  The one thing I didn’t love about Lonnie Holloway was her cat. Fluffers adored me, it seemed, and wanted to rub her gorgeous long coat against me any time she could. I’m sure she was a nice enough cat, but I am so dreadfully allergic to cats that I start sneezing simply looking at Fluffers.

  Fortunately, Fluffers was nowhere in sight this morning. It was only Lonnie, me, and Celia. Karen and her husband had left with their church home group for a short-term mission trip last week sometime—maybe Sunday? I couldn’t remember. Anyway, she would be gone another week or two. I knew she had been feeling a little anxious being halfway across the world in Uganda with no cell phone service or internet, but at least her twins—two sets of them—were staying with their grandparents.

  This morning, we met in Lonnie’s garden right as the sun began to rise. A small fountain bubbled gently amidst the wisteria, and the stepping stones were still wet with dew as we began by candlelight. Sitting in the fragrant silence, we quieted our hearts and minds before God.

  We lifted up our usual prayer requests—healing and comfort for Lonnie’s dad, who was dying of cancer. Wisdom and strength for Celia whose teenaged daughter was making bad choices. Protection and peace for my brother Jason in prison. Divine guidance for me with “the gift” situation and ongoing investigation. We moved on to pray for Karen and her husband and the success of the mission trip. And then we prayed for the grandparents. Hard.

  After prayer, I drove the short distance from Lonnie’s house to C. Willikers. As always, I admired the rose arbor and the overflowing pots of lime-green sweet potato vine that welcomed visitors to the quaint old building. It was about time to change the window display, though. I liked to change it often; sometimes featuring yarn, sometimes books, sometimes plants, but usually all three at once.

  This morning I had brought one of the books from The Gift to put in the window display. Once I had looked at it closer, I realized it was a fairly nice antique copy of Pilgrim’s Progress. Or at least, it looked antique to me. I have always loved old books, thinking of all the hands that had held that book before me…my imagination conjuring up the life stories behind an inscription or an old-fashioned name written in elegant handwriting, dated a hundred years or more before I was born. I especially loved old hymnals, and often got a chuckle out of the years-old notations made by long-gone organists or choir directors.

  Often the aged books themselves were not worth much, I was learning, but for those of us who loved all things written, old books were irresistible, tangible links to by-gone times; to other worlds. I set Pilgrim’s Progress on a stand in the window next to a basket of vintage spools of thread and a half-worked lace shawl, still on the knitting needles. An enormous asparagus fern and aluminum buckets full of fresh-cut daisies and black-eyed Susans made a beautiful summer window display, I thought, stepping outside briefly to see it from the street view.

  Someone honked and waved, and I waved back automatically. It was Houston, no doubt heading out for his morning doughnut. I sighed. I wasn’t a doughnut person, but a cup of tea and spending a few minutes working on the baby blanket I was knitting sounded like what I needed after yesterday’s events.

  I ambled toward the front door, fully cognizant of the fact that I was putting off talking to the sheriff. He had said he’d call me if they needed to talk to me again. So far, he hadn’t called, but things weren’t adding up in my brain. I felt like I needed to talk to him about what I’d seen Monday morning. I’d swing past the city offices and try to talk to Earl, then head back to the shop and put the finishing touches on the wedding flowers before I had to deliver them to the Methodist church at two this afternoon. Then after that, I had decided, I was going to the hospital to see crepe myrtle man for myself.

  But first, tea. While my electric kettle heated up, I grabbed my Bible and my flowered stationery. It had been too long since I had written to my brother, Jason. I usually tried to send him at least a card every week, even if I didn’t get a chance to write a longer letter. Now that I had moved halfway across the country, I couldn’t visit him very often.

  I could not imagine what it must be like to be in prison, but he seemed to be doing okay. He wrote me occasionally, always thanking me for my letters but never responding to my inquiries about his soul. The same when I talked to him on the phone every once in a while. We would chat about things for a few minutes, but whenever I mentioned God, the line went silent. I had learned to refrain from telling him things he already knew, and mostly I prayed for him that God would draw him back to Himself.

  I sat in my favorite rocker near the front display window. From here, I could see the cardinals and the sparrows taking turns at the birdbath. I had been delighted to see cardinals when I moved here, since they had been some of my favorite birds when I lived in Ohio. I loved their little “tip, tip, tip” noises that would alert me to their presence in my new yard. At my house, I had one of those feeders that was attached to my kitchen window, so I was constantly entertained with the many species of birds. I had been enjoying learning the names of the ones tha
t were new to me, and always kept a pair of binoculars handy on the kitchen table.

  I described the scene for Jason, knowing he loved birdwatching as much or more than I did. I chatted about the shop and about seeing Aunt Dot yesterday. I told him about how hot it was down here and asked how his GED classes were going, then hesitated. It didn’t seem wise to tell him about the crazy things that had happened in my life in the last couple of days. Maybe when it was all over, I would tell him the whole story.

  I could have walked to the city offices, since my shop was only a few blocks away, but it was already about one hundred degrees outside and I didn’t want to get all sweaty. I pulled up in front of the city offices/volunteer fire department, amused to see that the “ACCEPTING BRISKET DONATIONS” sign was again out front of the aging metal building. When I had first moved to Short Creek, I had puzzled over that sign for months. Were the firefighters especially hungry? If so, they had a pretty specific request. Brisket? Why not hot dogs? Or pizza? Maybe it was a joke.

  It was not until that fall, when they changed the sign to announce the annual BBQ fundraiser, that it dawned on me why they were asking for brisket donations. I guess I could have asked before then, but I had had enough on my mind at the time that it hadn’t been more than a casual wondering. In some small way, I realized this morning, I was starting to feel more like a part of this community, now that I understood the mystery of the brisket sign and was, apparently, on a first-name basis with the sheriff.

  I popped my head into the receptionist’s tiny office. “Tina?”

  The stale little office smelled like cigarette smoke and the decade’s worth of paperwork still stuffed in the aging file cabinets that crowded the room. A huge “Lorena Leopards—State Champions 2001” banner dominated the back wall, surrounded by about twenty framed high school basketball team photos. Probably Sheriff Earl’s sons, I thought.