by Paula Boyd
Lucille scowled, but did not, as one would expect, leap to deny my accusation. She straightened herself upright and crossed her arms, standing beside the table with her nose in the air, probably hoping a decent lie would find its way to her tongue. Clearly there was a well-marked path to follow so the odds were in her favor. “How dare you say such a thing to me,” she said, standing her ground.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
She flung her arms to the side and snapped the dishtowel again. “You most certainly will not!” Her hands fisted and she looked like she was trying to tear the towel to bits. “I cannot believe you’re doing this to me, I just cannot. Why, the very nerve.” And then she said the one thing that was guaranteed to always, always make things worse.” After all I’ve done for you.”
“That’s it,” I said, smacking my own hand on the table before I realized what I’d done. “I’ve heard you say that my entire life and I’ve had enough of it. Mother’s are supposed to do things for their children; it’s called being a parent. And since I’ve been on my own since the age of seventeen, I’m not that enthusiastic about polishing your martyr’s crown. So, frankly, I don’t ever want to hear about how much you’ve done for me ever again. Because if I do, I’m going to start listing what you’ve done to me and I won’t stop for about six weeks. Got it?”
The daggers shooting out from between the narrowed slits of her eyelids said she had. She was sucking in a breath to return fire when I sensed Jerry behind me. He must have been glaring at Lucille because she pressed her lips together in thin hard lines and marched back to the sink.
“Jo,” Jerry said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “That’s not going to get us anywhere.”
“It most certainly will not,” Lucille snapped, spinning around to face the table again. And I’ll tell you one thing, Miss Hateful Know-it-all, you don’t know half as much you think you do, you surely do not. And ‘love child,’ just what is that supposed to mean?” She glared and gritted her teeth. “I just cannot believe you would say such a thing to me. Why, the very nerve. I tried to shelter you from all that nasty business and just look what it got me, you turning on me like a rabid skunk. You might as well have just ripped my heart out and stomped on it, right here on the kitchen floor.”
Her eyes looked a little wet, but I wasn’t buying that charade. If she had actual tears it was because she was so mad she could spit. And, like the horny toads, was preparing to do so—out her eyes. I didn’t voice any of these thoughts, of course, just leaned back in the chair, crossed my arms and did my own thinking and fuming.
“Well, that’s just always the way of it, I suppose,” she said, sniffing just a bit to try to elicit some pity. “It’s just exactly like I’ve always said, the ones you love the most do you the dirtiest.”
That was not the first time I’d heard that particular phrase either, of course. But I sure didn’t have to hear any more. And if I stayed, she was going to hear some particular phrases from me. I patted Jerry’s hand, which was still on my shoulder, then stood. “Do what you will with her; I’ll be in the car.”
As the storm door hissed closed slowly behind me, I noticed a shadow off to my right on the porch. Fritz sat in a wooden rocker with a bowl of something in his lap. I hadn’t even realized he’d exiled himself from his own house. Smart man.
He tapped the bowl. “Sunflower seeds?”
“No, thank you though.”
“My Uncle Walter told me that sunflower seeds were the secret to a happy marriage. Kept a bowl of them out all the time. Whenever he felt the need, he’d get himself a handful. You think about it, you’re either working the salt off the shell, cracking it and getting the seed out or spitting out the hull. You can’t do a lot of talking when you’re busy working the seeds. Cuts way down on the chances that you’ll say something wrong and find yourself in more trouble. Odds are you don’t know what you did wrong anyway, and if you just keeping working the seeds, it’ll all blow over on its own.”
“From the size of that bowl, I’d say you do plenty of seed working.”
He cackled at that one. “I don’t mind. She’s worth it.”
The man was clearly out of his head and/or delusionally in love. Hard to imagine, but that sure did seem like the case. No sane man would put up with her otherwise.
“She don’t mean no harm, you know,” he said, the rocker creaking beneath him. “She just has funny ways about things sometimes.”
Yes, and her funny ways included lying, scheming, interfering with an official investigation and destruction of public and private property to name a very few. She was a real catch. “Yes, well, I may have a slightly different view of things.”
“She thinks you hung the moon, you know.”
No, I did not know. In fact, my take on that would be that I was the last one capable of moon hanging. In her opinion, I wasn’t even capable of writing about moon hanging. “Well, then I guess we’re in the dark phase now because I apparently just stomped her heart all across the kitchen floor.”
“Aw, I do that at least twice a week.” He chuckled and rubbed his chin. “She don’t really mean it. That’s just her way.”
It certainly was, and I’d had more than enough of her passive aggressive theatrics to last me five lifetimes. “Do you know what she’s up to?” This time. “She’s hiding something.”
“Nah, but it ain’t ever as bad as she seems to think it is.”
In my experience it was always far worse—and bizarre—than anything I could imagine. “I think she’s pushed Jerry too far this time.”
Fritz shrugged then reached down beside him and picked up a glass of ice tea. “Don’t you worry, she’ll come around. That mother of yours is a fine woman and she’ll set things to rights and everything will all work out just fine.”
Yes, and the pigs were perched in the mesquites ready for takeoff.
Fritz’s little love bubble of delusion would burst soon enough without my help so I muttered an “I hope so,” waved and hurried to the car.
I didn’t have the keys to the Expedition so I had to leave the door open for air. I could, however, lean the seat back, and did. I tried a little deep breathing and focusing on nothingness, but my lying mother’s words kept popping back into my head.
Love child? She hadn’t denied my accusations either, which most likely meant they were true. That, however, was a reality that I couldn’t really wrap my brain around just yet. I kept working at it, however, and by the time Jerry opened the door and got in, I had worked through the denial stage and was ready to join anger on the dance floor. “Dare I ask if you learned anything of importance?”
“She said she hadn’t heard from Sarah.” He buckled up and started the car. “It was the one thing she said that I actually believed.”
That didn’t make me feel better about anything. I raised the seat up and closed the door. “Do you think Sarah’s okay?”
He sighed and nodded. “Yes, I do.”
“I could fix that for her. She and her grandmother are both scheming liars. I do not know how it is that I am related to either of them.” I leaned back against the headrest. “Do you know how hard it is to find out your life is a lie? That your dad really wasn’t your father?”
“You don’t know that for a fact, Jolene. But if it is true, don’t be so quick to judge.” He pulled away from Fritz’s house and drove slowly down the dirt road toward the highway. Taking my hand, he said, “People do a lot of things because of love. If you and I had lived in the same town after high school, I can’t say for sure what I’d have done, married or not. Can you?”
Oh, now why did he have to go and say that? I’d like to think I’d have taken the high road and stayed far, far away from him, but how realistic was that? With Jerry Don Parker readily available to me, I think we all know what I’d have done. But would I have stayed married to Danny while I did it? No, I couldn’t have. Then again, the fact that I’d stayed married to Danny longer than twenty minutes, or hell, that I’d ev
en gone ahead with the ceremony after him not showing up on time because he’d lost the wedding band—Freudian slip is an understatement—does not point to someone capable of making good decisions. And let’s not forget my even better decision of running away from Jerry in the first place or there would have been no Danny. “You’re right, Jerry. I’ve done a lot of things I wish I hadn’t. I had reasons, of course. I even thought they were good reasons at the time. But they weren’t. They were stupid. Plain stupid.”
He squeezed my hand again, knowing exactly what I meant. “Let’s don’t go there, okay? We’re here now. That’s what counts.” He moved his hand back to the steering wheel and pressed his palm against it as if to push away the thoughts of what could have been if we hadn’t been foolish teenagers. We rode in silence for a long minute or two when he finally said, “Do you think she knows where Bob Little is?”
That thought hadn’t even occurred to me, but once it had, the answer came instantly. “Yes.” If Lucille and Bob were such “good friends,” then why wasn’t she worrying about him, begging Jerry to find him? Tiger was dead and it would be logical to fear the same fate for the man missing under mysterious circumstances. Yet Lucille hadn’t even mentioned being concerned about him. “Oh, yeah, she knows.”
We rode in silence for a few more miles until all the details came together in a nice neat package in my head. Okay, not all the details—we know how things work in my head—but certainly enough supposition to home in on the whereabouts of one Little Bob Little. “She knows exactly where he is, Jerry. And you know what? So do I.”
He glanced over at me with his typical skepticism. “And where would that be?”
“The lake cabin. She’s hiding him at her lake cabin.”
Chapter
Twenty-Two
“Hmmm.”
“That’s it, ‘hmmm’?” The more I thought about it, the more right it got. I stopped short of suggesting that we go get him, but it was implied. “He’s there, Jerry, he’s got to be.”
Jerry Don Parker did not immediately slam on the brakes, whip the car around or otherwise head to the lake as one would expect. He did pick up the phone and started punching in numbers, however the words “we’ll be at the courthouse in less than ten minutes” were what came out of his mouth instead of something pertaining to the supposed missing person and a SWAT team headed to the lake.
“I take it we aren’t going to race to the cabin.”
“No.” He glanced over at me, then back at the road and kept driving. “If he is there, then he isn’t missing and there’s been no foul play. I can’t arrest him for anything so I can’t keep him in custody. He’s probably sitting on the couch with a bag of chips and a beer, watching Survivor. I’d like to keep it that way until we get some other questions answered.”
“Well, I’m ready to get to him right now and have him answer a few questions for me that my lying mother won’t. I want answers, Jerry. Right now.”
“We’ll get to that. It just makes sense to get the facts first.”
“Facts would be good,” I agreed, thinking such things had been severely lacking up to this point. “My birth certificate is disqualified for obvious reasons, but facts could likely be had from a few polygraphs, DNA testing and perhaps a little water boarding.”
“I was leaning more toward checking mineral rights ownership records.”
“Oh.”
Jerry’s phone rang and he answered, but didn’t say much. “I’ll check it out,” he said, ending the call. “That was Perez. Some lab results came back.”
Maybe now we’d have some of those facts he wanted so badly, like the official cause of death for Tiger. “And?”
“Did you always have city water?”
Huh? That was an odd question. “As far as I know.”
“Is there a well on your mother’s property?”
I thought about it for a minute, visually scanning the lot. I knew what a wellhead looked like; I had one at home in Colorado. I didn’t remember anything like that specifically, but I did remember something. “There was something out away from the house that Dad always kept covered. He had a big heavy piece of iron pipe with a cap welded on the top that he set over it to keep it from freezing. I couldn’t lift it. Why?”
“Some lab results were faxed to the motel this afternoon.”
“To the motel? Where Tiger was?”
“Yes. Apparently Tiger had collected some water and soil samples and sent them off to a lab for analysis. They faxed back the results to the motel as he’d requested.”
“So is that what he had the glass jars for?”
“How’d you know about that?”
“Mother overheard the police talking when we were there.”
Jerry just shook his head. “According to what Perez was told, there are primary chemicals and then there are secondary ones, which had broken down from the original. These are apparently called daughter products and can be more hazardous than the original.”
Yes, I recognized the obvious gold mine of opportunity for laughs at my expense in that statement, but thankfully Jerry did not, or pretended not to anyway.
“Perez had a list. I recognized a few like benzene, and trichlor-something-terrible. Some of the levels were several hundred thousand parts per million.”
“That can’t be good,” I muttered.
“It isn’t.”
How bad was the question. How it all tied together was another. Tiger had come to town to help stop the park, presumably to save horny toads. His room contained soil and water sampling equipment, and a lab had faxed him back sample results. Bad results, apparently. In addition, aerial photos showed what looked like recent dirt work and some kind of drilling on the land behind my mother’s house. Why? As much as I hated thinking about it, I very well knew that plenty of illegal dumping and burying of toxic waste had been done around the country as well as the world, especially years ago. Why not here? Of course, here. Maybe especially here. A sick feeling settled in my stomach. “That could mean some kind of serious contamination, Jerry. If it’s in the groundwater, there’s no telling how bad it is or how many people have been affected—are still being affected.”
“We can’t automatically assume,” he said, “that the samples came from the Little Ranch.”
“They did.”
“Maybe. But they also could have come from your mother’s.”
Well, he had a point there. “Remember, Mother was complaining about people out behind her house drilling and doing all kinds of things. We assumed that to be the Little Ranch, but we now know it’s actually her property.”
“Right,” Jerry said, “and since that land is hers, why didn’t she stop them from doing something if she didn’t want it?”
“She just said that she let Bob take care of all that. But again, why?”
Jerry tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “I know that some of the chemicals Perez listed are related to the oil industry,” Jerry said. “So if the samples came from the Little property, or your mother’s, they could be typical of a recent spill, which is not that uncommon. Even small spills could have high concentrations in one area, so until we know where he sampled we’re just speculating.”
“Chemicals breakdown at different rates and change composition depending on a lot of factors. Tiger knew what he was looking for and if we had those lab results, we would too.”
Jerry raised an eyebrow. “College chemistry class kicking in?”
“Actually, my formal training in chemistry occurred in the seventh grade when Coach Eastman made us use beakers and Bunsen burners for something or other.” The look on his face told me I hadn’t cleared up anything at all. “I read a lot, Jerry,” I said, shrugging. “Environmental stuff is big in Colorado.”
“Well, then how are you on microbiology?”
“There’s been some real success with using specialized microbes for bioremediation of petroleum products and other hazardous wastes. It’s expensive but good for the envir
onment. But I’m guessing you really want to know about toxicology.” I grinned. “I’ve dabbled, but Doctor-Doctor-Doctor Travis would be able to look at those lab results and tell us immediately what Tiger suspected and if it could have had anything to do with his cancer.”
He turned and looked at me as if I’d just recited the Preamble to the Constitution in Chinese.
“Oh, don’t look at me like that. The information is there for anyone who wants to take the time to read it, which I generally don’t. I just happen to have a knack for remembering the highlights as I skim through. ”
“I had no idea, Jolene,” he said, glancing over at me again to be sure who was sitting in the car seat beside him. “No idea.”
“Well, geez, Jerry, how much time do we ever have to talk about normal topics of conversation? We don’t even discuss the weather. We talk about my mother and the dramas and mayhem she’s stirred up, and, most importantly, how to keep us all from getting killed because of it.”
“And that, my dear, is going to change.”
I wanted to believe him, I really did. I saw no hope of it, however. Not even a glimmer. I glanced over at him and smiled. “But for now…”
“Right. It doesn’t much matter what the temperature is or what oil is trading at.” He paused for a minute then said, “Or maybe it does. If the property is contaminated, the question becomes whether it’s related to the oil and gas activities or something else.”
“Either way, we need to know when it happened. Were they out there digging to bury more or trying to find out how bad whatever’s already there is?”
“If we could just look for bare dirt where they’d dug the holes that would be easy,” Jerry said. “But around here, there’s not a lot of good vegetation to begin with.”
I thought about that and tried to correlate it with what I’d read about the topic. “If it wasn’t related to an onsite spill, whatever is there was probably buried.