Burgundy and Bodies

by Sandra Woffington

  The lights were low, but given Joy’s snippety attitude, he didn’t feel like it was an invitation for making out, especially with her added warning that it wasn’t a date. Despite being pretty and witty and smart, not to mention her ability to handle a Glock, he never mixed business with pleasure.

  “Max,” Joy said in that don’t-get-excited voice she’d used on the chief and A-gamer. “Don’t move, okay? And keep your eyes closed.”

  Oh, boy! Did he misread women or what? Max opened his mouth to speak and opened his eyes at the same time. In his peripheral vision to the right of his head, he came face-to-face with the head of a snake—a huge head. It flicked its tongue at him. Max froze. He saw its golden scales and the crisp black stripe that ran from cheek to nose and its bulging, glossy, black eyes. It had a flat, black-topped head and a white underside. Max felt the strike of its flickering tongue against his cheek. If not for his training, he would have been on the ceiling by now—and not coming down anytime soon.

  “Shhhh,” said Joy as she nestled her legs up to the edge of the sofa between Max’s legs. That sound. He knew that sound! That same calming, shushing sound from his youth. Max stared into Joy’s face. His eyes cringed.

  Joy leaned over Max’s chest. She reached out, scooped up the snake from the back of the sofa, and stepped back. “Monty, bad girl. Sorry, Max. I should have named her Houdini. She is quite the escape artist.” Joy had not changed clothes, but she had thrown on a soft red and black silk robe. She plunked down beside Max, pulled her legs up, and crossed them. She coiled Monty—who had to be five feet long—in her lap and covered her with the robe. Monty’s head emerged and rested on Joy’s slender belly. Joy stroked Monty’s head. “There’s a drink on the end table.”

  Max saw the glass. He grabbed it and shot back the amber liquid, swallowing it in one gulp. It was whiskey. Good Scotch whiskey. It burned his throat in a pleasing way.

  “The bottle is on the counter.” Joy nodded straight ahead.

  “What is that?”

  “Monty is a ball python. She just turned twenty-one. Come on, girl. Time for bed.” Joy carried the snake down the hall. When she returned, she lit the fireplace and sat next to Max. “Sorry it’s warm in here. Monty likes it that way. So do I.”

  It had been one hell of a day. The under-counter lights lit up the bottle of Scotch. It glowed like a beacon, drawing Max toward it. The warmth of the room relaxed his nerves, or maybe it was the Scotch too. Max grabbed his glass and went to refill it.

  “Monty—python. Cute. My dad and I liked…” As Max poured himself another drink, his eyes caught hold of a silver frame. Two men, smiling like best friends, stood side-by-side holding fishing poles. Each of them held up a string of fish.

  Max grabbed the frame and spun around. “Is this some kind of twisted joke? Who are you?”

  Joy set Max’s keys on the distressed white coffee table. “I hoped you could tell me, Max.” Joy tossed back her drink and held out her empty glass. “Refill, please.”

  Max stuffed the bottle under his arm and returned to the sofa. He set his glass down on the table and set the picture between them. He poured another drink for both of them. “Why do you have this picture of my father?”

  “I knew it! You have the same picture, don’t you? It’s a picture of my father, Sam Burton.” Joy tossed her drink back. “I’ve thought about this moment for a long while now. A few weeks back, I came here to look for answers. My dad and I ate at Belle’s when we came through town. I went there and asked her if she knew the other man in the picture. She did. David King. I got so excited. All I had to do was find him. Then she told me he’d just passed.”

  It was time to ask his question. “Did you have a kitten? One that died?”

  Joy’s chin bobbed up and down. “But I don’t remember anything before that. I don’t think the kitten was a pet. But I wanted it to be. Someone else was there. Her arms were wrapped around me, and you were there. It was you, wasn’t it?”

  “Maybe.” Max could not bring himself to say ‘yes.’ That would make this real. He needed a way out.

  Joy snatched the picture from the sofa and struggled with the clips on the back. “Dad had this in a white wooden frame. I bought this silver frame for it just before I moved here. That’s when I saw this.” She pulled the back off of the frame and handed the picture to Max.

  Max stared at the image. He flipped it over. A note on the back read, “Find Pride.”

  Max’s mind exploded like a picture made of glass. The shards flew off in all directions: Anne’s dead body in the lake, body parts being severed and wrapped, Anne stealing drugs, Joy’s lecture about evidence, A-gamer holding the pool cue, Monty’s flicking tongue, and now, a little dark-haired girl holding a dead kitten, who grew up before his eyes into Joy. He’d wanted answers, but knowing he’d found the girl with the kitten suddenly overwhelmed him. His life had already been turned upside down in so many ways—he couldn’t handle another flip.

  Max tossed back his drink, grabbed his keys, and ran out of the house. He jumped into the truck and spun the wheels until traction propelled him down the driveway. He sank his head against the steering wheel while he waited for the gate to open. He barely waited for the gate to swing wide enough to let his truck pass through before he punched the gas and shot forward into the road.

  The street didn’t have much traffic and only minimal lights. But a horn blared. He’d cut off a car that had the bad luck to be in his way at the wrong time. Every dark, empty street felt like a labyrinth in a place he’d never known before. The darkness closed in on him, threatening to change everything he knew to be true into a lie.

  The little dark-haired girl shot up from the past. “It’s okay Pride. Shhhhh. Don’t make noise and she won’t find us.” Arms reached in and pulled them out from under the bed, their hiding place.

  When Max reached his own familiar turnoff, he raced up to the house and around the curved driveway that encircled an old oak tree. He braked hard. His feet dragged as he walked to the front door. He fumbled with his keys. It all hit him faster than he could comprehend. He remembered his father’s last words in the ambulance as he died: “Pride and joy. Find…joy.” He thought he meant happiness. What the hell was going on?

  Max raced inside, grabbed his framed picture, ripped the back off, and read the words. “Find Joy.” Joy was capitalized.

  Max hung his head. He’d lost his father. Joy had lost hers too. Where would they get answers now? He’d already grieved for his father’s death, but now anger welled within him. Why? Why did these two men keep secrets? One thing Max knew for sure: David King had loved Max every day to the day he died. He had tried so hard to speak in the ambulance, but Max wouldn’t let him. He’d ripped off his oxygen mask and pleaded with him, “Max, you gotta know.”

  But Max shushed him.

  David King tried to tell him something. But he’d run out of time.

  Max picked up the phone and pressed the call button. It didn’t even ring a full time before Joy picked up. “Max! Are you okay?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I should have waited.”

  “I wanted to ask you about the kitten at the funeral.”

  “We’ll figure this out. I was so stupid, Max.” Joy let out an audible whimper. “This is all my fault. Sam died months ago! Months! But I…I wallowed in this pit of depression. Had I started going through Sam’s things earlier…but I didn’t. I didn’t figure it out, until it was too late. By the time I came to Wine Valley to find you and your father, your dad had just died.”

  “You found me.”

  “But your dad had the answers we need.”

  Max felt a sudden calm, born of resolution not of conviction—they could only go forward. Who had named them Pride and Joy? How did they end up in the hands of two law enforcement officers, two single men who adopted them? And why did those men, clearly friends, keep them apart?

  “Max, are you there?”

  “Yeah. I w
as just thinking that it’s a good thing I’m a detective and you were raised by a profiler. We’ll find the answers.”

  “Damn straight we will, Max.”

  “See you tomorrow, pardner.”

  Joy let out an audible laugh mixed with a release of pain. “Sleep well—no homework.”

  Max hung up the phone. As he hovered beneath the hot shower and let the water pound at his head and back, the obvious answers came first—they’d both been adopted, so could they have come from the same foster home? Given their opposite appearances, Max leaned toward that hypothesis. Twins looked alike, even if fraternal: a boy and girl. Joy was dark. He was fair. She, meticulous; he, slovenly. He ran off of instinct; she ran off of calculations; she had dark eyes, his were blue.

  Max towel dried and jumped beneath the covers, too tired to grab his shorts. His mind kept asking questions, but the alcohol and sheer tiredness caused them to fade.

  Fitful nightmares punctuated with the happiest memories of his life flashed back and forth—black and white. The peace and bliss brought on by happy memories didn’t last, like riding a pony at the Wild West Harvest Festival with his father jogging along beside him.

  Those happy moments shattered into glassy shards and flew away. Were they even real? He tried to grab the pieces and tape them back together.

  The razor sharp edges slashed his palms.

  Blood oozed onto the mosaic he spent the night assembling and reassembling.

  Right before he woke up, he’d almost succeeded, but the picture he’d pieced together showed a portrait of one face compiled from many: his blue right eye, Joy’s brown left eye, his father’s nose, Sam Burton’s cheek. And…another face. One he didn’t know. A deep, dark brown third eye appeared on the forehead. It stared. Its pupil dilated as it focused on Max.

  Max shot awake and sat up, sweaty and breathing hard.

  15

  By the next morning, Max didn’t know what to say to Joy when they met at the station. He didn’t like change, and Joy could change everything.

  Luckily, she sensed his apprehension and left him alone.

  They stepped into his silver car, and Max drove away from Grape Gulch.

  “Even though toxicology isn’t back,” said Max, keeping the conversation on the case, “we should stop by to visit Eugene and Cynthia and see how they react to finding out Shane is dead.”

  “Good. I’d like to observe their natural habitat too. That might give me a clue to understanding their motivations.”

  Since Max ignored her, Joy fidgeted and sighed and mumbled under her breath beside him.

  He wasn’t dumb. He knew she wanted to talk, but he didn’t.

  She waited and waited for him to speak.

  Max didn’t even point out the sights, like when they passed by the equestrian park or the soccer fields. He kept his eyes on the road.

  Finally, Joy blurted, “We have to talk about this, Max.”

  “Nope,” he said. “We don’t. I changed my mind. I don’t want to know.”

  “Alright, I respect that, but I do, so…” Joy reached down and pulled a box out of her backpack. “All I need from you is a sample, and I’ll leave you out of it.”

  “A sample? What is that?”

  “It’s a sibling DNA test kit. This will show if we’re brother and sister or complete strangers.”

  “Forget it. You can try to unseal your adoption papers.”

  “That will take months of legal wrangling with the state of California. And a judge could still refuse to unseal them. Both of our fathers are dead—it would have been helpful if they had signed off on it. I already looked into this. If I had some genetic disease—cancer, for example—a judge might say yes for medical reasons, but the ‘I just want to know who my real parents are’ angle doesn’t work. Max, all I need is a thimble full of spit, literally, and in three to five days, we’ll know. I’ll know.”

  Max surveyed the hills on either side of him. He had a new appreciation for them—they remained the same. Immutable. Even if charred or burned, they would recover and be there, year after year, long after he left the Earth. The only changes in them amounted to seasonal color: now brown and gold with spots of olive, lush green by January after the winter rains, to vibrant splotches of purple and orange and yellow wildflowers in late February or early March.

  Max turned off the main road and onto a branch that led to Eugene’s house.

  “Just think about it,” said Joy. “That’s all I’m asking. If you don’t want to know, I won’t share the results. Max, look at me.”

  Max pulled into the clearing and parked the car. He peered into her dark pleading eyes.

  “I…I need to know.” Joy’s voice trembled. “You feel fixed, secure. I never have. I’ve never felt like I belonged. I didn’t have any friends growing up—except for Monty. And I didn’t just shave my head.” Joy peeled back the long sleeve of her white cotton shirt. She showed Max a faint scar that ran across her right wrist.

  “That’s a scratch, not a scar.”

  “That’s because I didn’t go through with it.”

  “Why not?”

  “What?”

  “Why not?”

  “Seriously? Because of Hamlet. He ruined it for me.”

  “Hamlet?”

  “You know, ‘to be or not to be.’ Hamlet hates his life. His uncle poisoned his father and married his mother. So he’s thinking of suicide, of taking his ‘bare bodkin,’ a knife, and killing himself, so he can ‘sleep,’ but then he starts to think—wait—if I sleep, I’ll dream, and if I dream, maybe I’ll have nightmares, and maybe the living nightmare is better than the one I’ll have if I kill myself. And then he realizes he thought about it too much, so now he can’t go through with it, because thinking has ‘made him a coward.’”

  “That’s why it’s a scratch?”

  “Max, it’s not always the deepest cuts that hurt the most. Sometimes, a tiny scratch cuts the deepest.”

  “No wonder you dove into psychology and sociology.”

  “Give me a chance to get grounded—like you.”

  Max paused. He grabbed the wheel to hold on to something that could anchor him. He curled his fingers around it and squeezed until his knuckles turned white just to feel something solid. “What if grounding you shatters me?”

  “I won’t let that happen.”

  “You can’t make that promise!”

  Max jumped out of the vehicle, slammed the car door, and stomped to the house.

  Max knocked. When he had spotted Joy on the hill at the funeral, he felt that inner pang to dig. But now, realizing all that he might unearth made him throw down the shovel. Leave it buried and life wouldn’t change. Some part of him knew something of the past. A gut feeling. It wasn’t pretty. And that young part of him, that little boy, had dug a pit, put the past in it, and heaped on the dirt. He’d buried it so deep, he couldn’t remember it. There had to be a good reason.

  Cynthia swung the door open. She still wore the apron but had on a flowered dress. “Detective King.”

  “Hi, Cynthia. I’m sorry if I scared you last night at the mortuary. Just doing my job. This is Joy Burton. She’s working with me now. Can we talk to you and your father for a minute? It’s important.”

  “Sure. Come in. I just made a fresh coffee cake with cinnamon topping and icing swirls. It’s Dad’s favorite. Made from scratch.”

  “That sounds lovely, Cynthia. Thank you,” said Joy, already following her inside.

  “Coffee or tea?” asked Cynthia, delighted by Joy’s acceptance.

  “Green tea if you have it,” said Joy.

  “I do. Detective King?”

  “Coffee, black.” He really did look forward to fresh coffee cake topped with sugar. He used sugar like salve, and this morning, he needed lots of salve. His dad used to cook waffles or buckwheat pancakes on the weekends, or sometimes, they stopped at the local donut shop. That was why he liked donuts so much—they came with family ties.

  Eugen
e had been reading a book when they came in. His face formed a scowl upon seeing them. “Here to arrest me?”

  Max and Joy sat in the floral chairs opposite the sofa.

  Max apologized, even though he hadn’t done anything wrong. He apologized to diffuse a hostile witness. David King would say, “Give ‘em sugar and butter ‘em up until they slide right through your palms and land in the roasting pan, right where you want ‘em.” “Mr. Carter, I do apologize for breaking in on you. It may not make you feel any better, but we were tailing Dr. Grant. Not you. We have to follow leads. I hope you understand.”

  Cynthia brought over pieces of cake on floral china plates and handed them out. She took Eugene’s empty cup away to refill it. “That’s what I told him. You have a job to do, and you need to do it.” Cynthia brought Joy her tea, Max his coffee, and rushed back to the kitchen.

  Joy bit into the cake. “Wow! I’m not much of a cook, Cynthia. This is fabulous!”

  Max wished he’d said it first. Apparently, Joy knew about using sugar too—of course she did. It was her career. Max took a bite. “Oh, man. You weren’t kidding. Delicious.”

  “Well, there’s plenty more,” said Cynthia, beaming. She set down Eugene’s refilled cup and a tea for herself and settled on the sofa.

  Eugene snarled. He hadn’t touched his cake yet. “I know you’re not here for cake. Why are you here?”

  Max set down his plate, as this was not the kind of news a person broke at a tea party. He leaned forward, rested his hands on his knees, and hung his head to show sympathy. He swallowed the bite in his mouth. “I’m sorry, but Shane Drake is dead.”

  Cynthia reacted first. “When? How?” she cried out and sank into her father’s arms. “Papa!”

  Eugene wrapped protective arms around his daughter.

  Joy leaned forward. “It happened yesterday evening. It looks like an accidental overdose. Painkillers. I’m so sorry. It’s shocking news.” Joy rose to her feet and paced the floor.

  Max jumped in, “We won’t know for sure until the toxicology comes back.”