by Tawni O'Dell
“You think I’m wrong?”
“Not my place to say.”
“I wouldn’t know how to find him.”
“You’re a cop. Can’t you find people? Ain’t that part of your job?”
He hits something solid with a clunk. I see a trace of a smile on his face.
“The dryer,” he proclaims.
I close the box and slip it into my jacket pocket.
I don’t particularly want him to see the shape I’m in, but my curiosity wins out over my pride. I slowly, painfully get down on my knees, but I can’t see anything.
I stretch out on my stomach next to him. He gives me the pole and points at a spot. I lift and plunge and feel the impact travel up the wood.
“You’re right,” I marvel.
“Ivan,” I hear Chastity call out, and she doesn’t sound happy.
“Damn. I’m in trouble,” I say to Jess, even though he can’t have any idea what I’m talking about. “She was late to begin with. Now she’s going to be really late.”
I hear her heavy breathing and light footfalls approaching us.
I wait to hear scolding, but I hear laughter instead.
We both roll onto our sides and look up.
She has her hands on her hips. Her cheeks and lips are flushed with color from the cold. The wind tosses her hair around behind her in a wild, dark tangle.
“This is what was so damned important?” she asks. “You had to come down here and play in the mud with your little friend?”
“Chastity, this is Jess Raynor,” I make the introductions. “Jess, this is Chastity.”
“Nice to meet you,” she says to him.
Jess touches the bill of his cap with his filthy hand.
“Likewise,” he says back.
She crouches down between us while rubbing her hands together and blowing into them.
“You cold?” Jess asks.
She nods.
“Is it true what they say about the land around here?” she asks him.
In reply he sticks his hands into the gaping scar in the ground and brings them back brimming with dirt.
She cups her cold hands and holds them out to him, and he fills them with the warm, steaming earth.
———
Muchmore has his practice in a big blue Victorian house trimmed in white about a block away from downtown, where the business district starts to blend with a residential neighborhood.
The large front porch has two long wooden flower boxes bursting with bright red, yellow, and orange flowers. It’s still too cold for them to survive the nights. I have an image of a couple of his high-heeled, tight-skirted paralegals out there at the end of every workday and first thing every morning, one at each end, lugging the heavy boxes in and out of the office to keep the flowers warm overnight. I make a mental note to find out if this is how they do it and, if so, to cruise by some morning and watch.
A pretty young receptionist smiles brightly at me when I walk in and approach her desk. The house still looks like a house, not an office. Her desk is off the foyer in a room that was probably a parlor and is still decorated like one, with a grandfather clock against one wall, lace curtains, and a mahogany curio cabinet filled with law books now instead of figurines.
Her smile falters for a moment when she notices how dirty I am. She stares forlornly at the glowing finish of the hardwood floor I’m standing on, then glances past me, trying to see if I left muddy footprints on the pristine rose-patterned carpet in the hallway. When she sees that I didn’t, the smile returns.
“Can I help you?”
“I hope so. I need to see Muchmore.”
“Mr. Muchmore is due in court. He’s on his . . .”
Her voice trails off as we hear footsteps coming down the hallway.
“I should be back around noon,” Muchmore says as he steps into the room, carrying a briefcase and wearing a long, cream-colored wool coat and the glossiest black shoes I’ve ever seen aside from the ones the politicians wore the day they announced in the school multipurpose room that all the ground beneath Coal Run was on fire.
“Ivan,” he announces.
He comes at me with his jousting pole of a handshake. I’m tempted to step aside at the last minute just to see if he’d keep going and end up putting his arm through the window, but I restrain myself. As usual, the actual clasp of his hand is quick and weak.
“This is a pleasant surprise,” he says, then steps back, smiling, and raises his briefcase in front of his face as if he’s defending himself against me. “Wait a minute. Are you here as friend or foe?”
“Neither.”
He laughs.
“No hard feelings about the other night then?”
“No hard feelings.”
She’s mine, I want to shout. But she’s not mine. She wasn’t his either. She’s hers.
“Good. Good,” he says, nodding. “Are you here about Dr. Ed? About what I mentioned at dinner the other night?”
“No. I told him what you told me. I guess he’ll be in touch if he feels he needs to be.”
“Good. Good.”
He glances at his watch.
“Hey, I’m due in court. Let’s walk and talk.”
“Hey, why not.”
We step outside. It’s a clear, sunny day, but cold. He pulls a pair of black leather gloves out of one pocket and slips them on. The courthouse is a five-minute walk from here.
“I wanted to ask you something about Reese Raynor. You remember Reese Raynor?”
“Of course I do. That was a big case for someone to try their first year with the public defender’s office.”
“Were you happy with the outcome?” I ask him.
“As his lawyer, it wasn’t really up to me to be happy or unhappy with the outcome. I felt I did a good job of defending him, so I guess you could say I was happy with my performance.”
I give him a hard stare.
“But I guess it’s safe to say that you weren’t happy with the outcome,” he adds.
“I’m an eye-for-an-eye kind of guy. I thought he should have been taken outside and beaten into a coma with a baseball bat.”
“Well, that’s not the way the system works.” He gives me his slow, superior smile. “The district attorney’s office accepted the reduced plea. The jury found him guilty. The judge gave him the sentence. They all had much more to do with the outcome than I did. I just defended him because that was my job at the time. But for the record, that case was the beginning of the end of my interest in criminal law.”
“Why’s that?”
We arrive at my truck. I lean against the hood. He’s about to do the same, then notices how dirty my truck is and stands back.
“About a year after the trial, I was defending a man involved in a drunk-driving accident. I needed to interview his father, who was also involved and was dying in Cherry Tree State Hospital. While I was there, the name of the hospital seemed very familiar, but I couldn’t remember why. Then it suddenly came to me. It was the hospital where Crystal Raynor had been committed.
“I decided to visit her. I can still remember feeling smug about it. Thinking I was such a great guy for visiting her. I was very impressed with myself and my so-called compassion. Then I saw her.”
He looks past me down the street.
I wait for him to tell me this is when he decided to pay to put her in Safe Haven. He doesn’t, and I feel a grudging respect for him. Maybe he did it to ease a guilty conscience, or maybe he did it because he truly wanted something better for her, but he definitely didn’t do it in order to make other people think he’s a great guy.
I understand why he told Chastity, though. She’s the kind of woman who motivates men to concoct stories about saving children from burning buildings and delivering home-cooked meals to elderly shut-ins in order to impress her. I told her about Ivan Z’s Tacklebreaker Brickle. She asked me why I didn’t get to have something chocolate named after me.
“Have you ever been inside Cherry
Tree Hospital?” he asks me.
“Yeah.”
He shakes his head. “It’s a terrible place.”
“Yeah.”
“So what did you want to ask me about Reese?”
“Did you know he’s been released?”
He nods. “Yesterday, I believe. Last time I talked to Dr. Ed, about a month ago, he told me his release date.”
“Isn’t that a strange thing for you and Dr. Ed to be discussing?”
“Not really. Ed was involved with the case, and he’s also maintained a correspondence with the people who adopted John Raynor.”
“You’re kidding.”
I’m not sure what to make of this new bit of information.
“I thought the records were sealed and no one was allowed to know who adopted him.”
“You know Ed,” he laughs. “Sending John’s medical records to his new pediatrician wasn’t good enough for him. He wanted to talk to the new parents, and somehow he was able to convince the district attorney to let him. As we all know, Ed has a knack for convincing people to see things his way.
“I guess the parents were impressed with him and his concern for John’s welfare, and they’ve kept in touch with him all these years. They send him a school picture every year. They sent him a high-school-graduation announcement and a clipping from the newspaper last year when he won some sort of track award. He’s doing very well.”
“So you’re saying Dr. Ed’s seen a recent picture of him?”
“Fairly recent.”
After Chastity’s revelation that Muchmore paid for Crystal’s care at Safe Haven, I began to think he might be the one who sent me the clipping about Reese’s release. If he’s that committed to Crystal, I thought he might want to seek some kind of revenge for her, but in order for him to realize I’d be the perfect person to send after Reese, he’d have to believe I had a good reason for wanting him dead, too.
“You said Dr. Ed was involved in the trial. How?”
“He came to me with some information about John that he thought might be important.”
“What kind of information?”
“I can’t say.”
“Was the information that Reese wasn’t the boy’s real father?”
“You know?”
“Yeah, I know.”
I check his face for his reaction. He doesn’t show any sign that he thinks I’m personally involved.
“Ed figured it out the first time he saw John as an infant,” he continues. “Apparently there was no way the combination of Crystal’s blood type and Reese’s blood type could make John’s blood type. When he asked Crystal about it, she admitted that the baby wasn’t Reese’s, but she would never tell him who the real father was. She did tell him that the real father knew about the baby, and he didn’t want anything to do with either of them.”
Hearing myself described that way is unpleasant but truthful. I try to ignore the sting of the remark.
Muchmore doesn’t need any encouragement to continue telling his story. He seems to be enjoying giving me the details.
“I asked Reese about it during the trial. He admitted that he wasn’t the boy’s real father, but Crystal put his name on the birth certificate, so unless parentage is contested in court by the biological father, he is legally the father.
“It was a fleeting consideration of Ed’s that if John had a real father out there, maybe we should attempt to find him. Then we decided that if in fact what Crystal told him about the real father was true, if he was living anywhere in the vicinity, possibly even the state, he would have heard about the case and would have had ample opportunity to step forward and claim his son. Otherwise he was long gone. In the end we decided not to tell the district attorney what we knew.”
“Thanks,” I stop him from going any further. “You answered my question about Reese.”
Dr. Ed knows my blood type. He saw me attending Reese’s trial. He’s seen a recent photo of John.
“All right, then.” Muchmore checks his watch again. “I really do need to get going.”
“Wait a minute,” I tell him. “I have something for you.”
I reach into one of the boxes in the back of my truck and hand him a J&P ball cap.
“It’s from Zo Craig,” I explain.
I show him the piece of masking tape on the underside of the bill with his name on it.
“She’s dispensing her possessions from the great beyond.”
He takes it from me in one of his gloved hands, grinning broadly, and sets it gingerly on top of the meticulously arranged haystack of his hair, where it sits like an undersize derby on a clown’s wig.
“How do I look?” he asks.
Pretty damn stupid, I think.
“You look good,” I tell him. “And this is for you, too.”
I hand him one of the boxes of cigars from Marcella’s that I billed to his table.
“Ivan, this is very generous of you.”
“Well, I came into some good fortune lately. I’m feeling generous.”
He smiles at me.
“This is one of my favorite brands,” he says.
“I had a feeling.”
I watch him start down the street, waiting to see if he takes the hat off. He doesn’t, but he doesn’t pull it down tight on his head either. It’s still miraculously balancing on top of his hair when he turns the corner.
I take the clipping out of my wallet and read the words written in the margin: “What are you going to do?” Of course it was Dr. Ed. Only Dr. Ed would ask me that question. I’m amazed I didn’t figure it out before.
“The son of a bitch,” I mutter under my breath.
He knew I needed a reason or at least an excuse. He knew it would bring me back.
22
EB SUDDENLY PINGS INTO THE KITCHEN LIKE A COIN LET LOOSE inside a dryer. He manages to touch every surface within thirty seconds of his arrival, including his brother, who shoves him. He shoves back. They get into a small scuffle, which my mom has to break up.
“Behave,” she tells them gently.
Her eyes fall appreciatively on the sparkling lemon meringue pie sitting on the counter that Jolene made for dessert. Then they fall on me.
“Aren’t you going to change?”
“I already changed once today.”
“I know. I saw your shirt lying on top of the laundry basket. What were you doing? Rolling around in the mud?”
“Not rolling. Just lying in it.”
She gives me a suspicious frown.
“It’s Val, Mom. He doesn’t expect me to put on a suit. Besides, I have to work tonight.”
“I thought you worked all day?”
“I had transport. I spent the whole day on the road, and I never got around to anything else. I have some paperwork to take care of tonight. That’s all.”
The frown deepens. She always knows when I’m lying. She rarely pursues trying to find out why I’m lying or trying to find out the truth, but we both know that she knows I’m hiding something.
“You look very nice tonight.” I try to change the subject.
I’m not lying. She does look nice. She’s wearing a dress. It’s nothing fancy, but I’ve never seen my mother in a fancy dress since my father died. She used to wear pretty dresses to church on Easter and Christmas Eve and to the family dinner at her parents’ house on Christmas Day.
Tonight she has on a long-sleeved, deep blue dress. The color compliments her eyes, and the fit shows off the fact that she still has a slim figure. She’s wearing her hair down. It’s straight and shoulder length.
Unlike most women her age, she has refused to cut it short and perm it and wear it in an old-lady bob. She can get away with it because her hair is still shiny and thick. Jolene is always telling her if she colored her hair, she could pass for forty-eight, and my mother is always telling her she doesn’t have the energy to go undercover.
“You’re trying to change the subject,” she tells me. “But thank you anyway.”
&
nbsp; We each take an end of the kitchen table and pull it apart so we can insert the addition. Jolene had to borrow two folding chairs from a neighbor. I know I’m going to have to sit in one of them.
She breezes into the kitchen looking great in one of the dresses she bypassed for Zo’s funeral. It’s short black lace with fringe around the hem and the low-cut neckline.
Harrison takes one look at her and asks, “Who’s the victim?”
“There’s no victim. We’re having a dinner guest, so I wanted to look nice.”
“That’s what I mean. Who’s the victim?”
“He’s an old friend of the family we haven’t seen since Uncle Ivan was Eb’s age.”
They both stare at me, trying to imagine me at Eb’s age, then trying to imagine Eb at my age.
“He used to live next door to us in Coal Run,” she finishes.
She’s carrying a tablecloth that she snaps into the air. It floats onto the tabletop, and she and Mom position it.
“Did you check the turkey?” Jolene asks Mom.
“It’s perfect,” Mom replies.
“I can’t believe we’re having Thanksgiving in March.” Eb hops up and down. “Stuffing and gravy. This is so cool.”
He’s wearing his green Thanksgiving tie with a bug-eyed, terror-stricken turkey on it.
Jolene pauses in checking the contents of every pan on the stove and glances at me.
“Aren’t you going to change?”
“That’s it.” I throw up my hands. “Who wants to play Nintendo?”
I grab my can of beer, and Eb and I race from the kitchen. Harrison always saunters, and he pays for it this time.
“Harrison, set the table,” I hear his mom command.
The house was already filled with the smell of turkey when I arrived. By the time Val arrives an hour later, we’ve all begged Jolene a dozen times to let us start without him.
Mom answers the door when he knocks.
He’s wearing a clean pair of jeans, the same army boot and big heavy shoe at the end of his prosthetic that he wore to Zo’s funeral, a barn red corduroy work shirt, and the Castro cap. He’s carrying a six-pack.
Mom’s eyes gleam with tears when she sees him.
“Val,” she says simply.
She reaches out, grasps him by the shoulders, and kisses him on the cheek. He stands stiffly, his eyes like cleats nailed to the floor. His free hand rises slightly, as if he means to put it on her back, but then it falls to his side again.