Dr. Strange Beard

by Penny Reid

  I had the sudden urge to do something shocking, like grab his face and kiss him, or flash him, or scream at him. It was confusing. I swallowed that urge.

  But I was still raw with frustration.

  “Roscoe.”

  “Yes?”

  “Look at me.”

  His eyes cut to mine, and the swirling mess of feelings there hit me right in the chest. I couldn’t untangle them before he looked away, returning his gaze to some spot beyond the windshield, the muscle at his jaw jumping. My earlier hunch that he had a crush on me, or strong unresolved feelings of some sort, solidified.

  Exasperatingly, the crumpled sheet of paper that was my heart softened. I hated that it softened. I was glad that I didn’t let feelings be my guide because my feelings were clearly dumb as rocks.

  “Okay,” I started again, determined to get this over and done with so I could leave. “What I think we should do is—”

  Kiss!

  “Is—uh—”

  What the heck? Where had that thought come from?

  Not understanding myself, or the jump in my pulse, I doubled down on my attempt to focus, and started again, “If we happen to be at the same place at the same time, we should stop and talk to each other. That’s what I’m suggesting. Over the coming weeks and months, leading up to the wedding, whenever that is, if we happen to be in the same place at the same time, we should be friendly and exchange words,” I finished on a rush, now much too hot beneath the blanket.

  Holy crackers, what was wrong with me?

  “If we run into each other, I can do that,” he said evenly, giving me the impression that Roscoe Winston would do everything in his power to avoid me. Again.

  Well, the joke was on him.

  That tracker would tell me precisely where his vehicle was at all times. Luckily, a ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals allows for law enforcement to secretly place tracking devices on cars without getting a warrant, even if the car is parked in a private driveway. Roscoe’s truck had been parked at Genie’s when I’d placed the tracker.

  He could put that in his pipe and smoke it . . . should he take up pipe smoking.

  “I guess I’ll be going now,” I said, shoving the blanket off and opening the door, half expecting steam to rise from my skin and somewhat surprised when it didn’t.

  As I stood, I took the time to refold his blanket and place it in the front seat. In the time it took me to do so, he’d come around to my side and shut my door when I was finished.

  “Are you going back inside?” he asked easily enough, looking at me now.

  I studied him and his carefully stoic features. Actually, they weren’t stoic. They were lacking in all expression.

  “I need to get my jacket, but I think I’ll head home.”

  He nodded, stuffing his hands in his pockets.

  Inexplicably flustered, I turned and walked to the bar. He came around and opened the door to Genie’s for me before I had a chance to reach for it. I didn’t think much of it, all the Winston boys were like this, they were stubborn in their chivalry. My brother and my dad were the same way.

  It was a southern thing.

  Anyway.

  Finding and grabbing my coat, I walked back through the door—which Roscoe still held open—and gave him a small nod.

  “Goodbye, Simone,” he said, like it was truly goodbye, the last time we would meet, his gaze soft as it traveled over my features.

  I pulled on my coat and glared at him. “I’ll see you later,” I responded, like it was a threat.

  Because it was.

  * * *

  I didn’t “accidentally” run into Roscoe the next day, although I could have.

  When I watched his car depart Green Valley on Sunday via the GPS, I felt relief. I needed time to stew and simmer in my hunch.

  My relief was short-lived, because Nelson wanted a progress report mid-week and wasn’t pleased that I’d obtained no new intel about Darrell from Roscoe.

  “He’s in Nashville during the workweek, according to his brother Beau,” I explained, having learned as much from Beau and Shelly when they’d come in to the diner on Monday evening for pancakes. “Roscoe drives home—to Green Valley—every Thursday. I’ll find out more this weekend.”

  Nelson made a face. “He’s a grown man who drives home, four hours, every weekend? He’s your age, right?”

  “Yes. But his family is really tight-knit.”

  “No. That’s not being tight-knit with your family. That’s being twenty-six and unable to cut the apron strings.”

  Instinctively, I bristled at that, but said nothing because Nelson was mostly right. There was something off about Roscoe. The way he’d flirted with Charlotte but shot her down, that was strange.

  Right?

  Right.

  “What’s the plan? How are you going to get him to speak to you?” Nelson stood from the kitchen table where she’d been taking notes and moved to the safe house's fridge. Opening it, she pulled out a vitamin water.

  “I think . . .” I recalled the way Roscoe had looked at me in the bar and in his truck. Maybe more important was the way he wouldn’t look at me. “I think he has a crush on me.”

  Actually, I was 97 percent certain he had a crush on me.

  I’d been putting the pieces together for the last few days. The hunch had ceased being a hunch. It had developed into a full-fledged hypothesis and was on its way to becoming a theory.

  Contributing evidence: When we were young, just after my sixteenth birthday, we’d kissed each other a few times on a few different occasions, mostly because neither of us had kissed anyone. It had been fun, at least I’d been having fun. But he’d put a stop to it, making some excuse about the sacredness of kissing and an impassioned speech about wanting to save himself for someone who loved him, or something like that.

  As I’ve mentioned, Roscoe was sensitive. A romantic, through and through.

  So I’d taken him at his word and we’d stopped.

  But shortly after that, he’d ghosted me.

  I’m not saying correlation equals causation, I’m just saying the evidence was piling up in support of my hypothesis.

  “He has a crush on you?” Nelson said the word crush with derision. “What is he? Ten?”

  An image of Roscoe, as he was now, came to mind.

  No. Definitely not ten. Nope.

  “We were friends growing up. He abruptly stopped talking to me when we were sixteen.” I stood as she sat down, crossing to the fridge for my own drink. “It hadn’t occurred to me at the time, but looking back, I think he stopped talking to me because he wanted more from the friendship.”

  “And you didn’t?”

  I thought about her question as I reclaimed my seat.

  My pragmatic, too-literal heart hadn’t considered the possibility when I was sixteen. It wasn’t that I had a low self-image, not at all. This is usually everyone’s first assumption when I discuss my teenage self, or my now self, and my priorities, goals, and interests. My self-image is based almost entirely on my brain and my brain’s interests, which seems to be a difficult concept for most people to grasp.

  I’ve never been into romance and such, finding puzzles, mysteries, and science more alluring and interesting than almost anything else. The marriage of chemistry and physics was the only kind of marriage that had been of interest to me.

  “No. I didn’t,” I finally answered. “If he’d asked me to be more than friends, I would have turned him down. Maybe he knew that or figured it out somehow.”

  “And he still has a thing for you now? Which is why you’re having trouble getting intel out of him.”

  “I’m not having trouble.” I was having trouble.

  “You could use his crush, his feelings, to your advantage.” Nelson typed as she spoke. “Go on a few dates, get the info that way.”

  My entire person rejected her suggestion on a cellular level. I didn’t owe Roscoe anything other than the same basic level of respect I had
for all humans, which meant he didn’t deserve to be led on, manipulated, or lied to.

  I needed information from him, but I wouldn’t stomp on his heart to get it.

  “Speaking of Roscoe”—I opened my vitamin water and fiddled with the cap—“Are we going to allow the Wraiths to pick him up?”

  Nelson ceased typing and looked me squarely in the eye. “We are.”

  I huffed, disgruntled—which I’d expected—but also acutely alarmed, which I hadn’t expected. “Really?”

  “If Winston wanted to hurt him, he would have done so last Thursday, when he had him alone.”

  “I was there.”

  “Winston isn’t the kind of guy to let a waitress stop him. He would have found a way to deal with you both, if he’d wished to.” She wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. “Assessment is that Winston wants to talk to Roscoe, not injure him.”

  I studied my bottle cap and thought back to the look Darrell had given Roscoe last Thursday as we’d walked away. It wasn’t the look of a man who wanted to harm anyone; it was the look of a man who wanted a relationship with his son.

  “So the Wraiths take Roscoe . . .” I would be shadowing Roscoe constantly whenever he was in town. Where he went, so I would go. If the Wraiths took him, I wouldn’t be far behind. “And we don’t even give him a heads-up.”

  “That’s right.” Nelson took a swig from her drink, nodding. “And when they let your boyfriend go, you’ll find out what Winston wanted.”

  Boyfriend.

  I snort-laughed lightly, shaking my head, while Nelson’s mouth curved into a rare smile.

  During the ensuing moments of quiet, the word settled around me and I found my throat grow tight. Curtis Hickson had been my sister’s boyfriend. They were always in fights, always making up and breaking up, wreaking havoc on each other until they’d run away together, and then they wreaked havoc on us all.

  So, no.

  Roscoe wasn’t my boyfriend.

  I’d never had a boyfriend. Nor did I want one.

  Chapter Eight

  “I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”

  Virginia Woolf

  *Simone*

  Tracking Roscoe had become just as much of my routine as checking for friend and celebrity updates on social media. Of note, some of my favorite celebrities to follow were Neil deGrasse Tyson (informative), Issa Rae (hilarious), and Merriam-Webster (informative and surprisingly hilarious).

  NERDS UNTIE! … er, unite. Not untie.

  You know what I mean.

  Anyway, I’d discovered quite a lot about this new Mr. Roscoe Orwell Winston, Local Man of Mystery, since placing the tracker on his car.

  He woke up early. I knew this because he arrived to work early, a veterinary clinic in Nashville. It had a specialty consult for large animals in addition to a prosaic pets practice.

  Also, in case I haven’t mentioned it prior to now, Roscoe was a veterinarian. This was information I’d read in his file several months ago, and information I already knew just from overhearing folks in the diner gossip over the past few years. But it was also information my dad made a point to share with me when Roscoe had been accepted into the veterinary program, and when Roscoe started the program, and when Roscoe graduated from the program.

  I think my father took Roscoe’s sudden disappearance from my life—or, more precisely, our lives—harder than I had. Furthermore, I sometimes got the impression he still wasn’t over it.

  But anyway, back to tracking Roscoe.

  He must’ve packed a lunch to work every day or walked to get it, because he didn’t leave work until after 5:00 PM. He would then drive to an animal shelter, a different one each night, where his car remained until 9:00 PM or so. After which, he’d go back to his apartment.

  Curiouser and curiouser, I searched for him online, scoured social media, which was something I’d sworn to myself years ago I would never do. But since it was for work, I rationalized the intel gathering was necessary for the case.

  I didn’t find much. Roscoe didn’t have a Twitter or Facebook account. So, on a hunch, I looked up the Facebook page for the vet clinic where he worked. Lo and behold, there he was on the banner, surrounded by adorable puppies.

  As I’d scrolled through, I couldn’t help but smirk. The photos of Roscoe had more hearts and thumbs-up than any of the other content. And, let me tell you, the comments were a journey. Several had me laughing uncontrollably, especially the one shot of Roscoe holding a kitten. Who knew there were so many suggestive puns about felines? Now I did. The replies were a masters course in cat-vagina

  euphemisms.

  Presently, I was sitting in the safe house on Thursday night, watching his car travel closer to Green Valley. Roscoe had left work promptly at 5:00 PM and it was now 8:30 PM. Interestingly, he hadn’t taken I-40 for most of the trip, preferring smaller state roads, like the Oak Ridge Highway.

  I’d been told it was a scenic drive on the Oak Ridge Highway between Oliver Springs and Knoxville. I’d also been told there were historic Cherokee caverns just before Karns which were decorated with lights and displays around Christmastime.

  Beyond Knoxville, I’d never driven on the Oak Ridge Highway, though I’d always wanted to see the caverns. When my family drove any significant distance—like to Nashville—we stuck to the large freeways, and ventured out only during daylight hours, never at night.

  Roscoe was approaching Solway now, and I watched as he took the exit for the Pellissippi Parkway. This route made sense if he didn’t want to drive through Knoxville. Assuming he didn’t make any detours, he’d be in Green Valley in about an hour.

  Biting my thumbnail, I fretted. In case it wasn’t apparent by now, I wasn’t much of a fretter. When I fretted, it was usually about TV shows and fictional characters.

  The plan for this coming weekend was to magically pop up wherever Roscoe happened to be and remind him of his promise to talk and interact with me if we ran into each other. This plan also had the happy byproduct of ensuring the Wraiths didn’t get a chance to pick him up. If they took Roscoe, they were going to have to take me, too.

  It’s not that I didn’t trust Nelson’s assessment of the situation. More so, it’s simply that, for some people, I would never be able to sit on my hands and do nothing if I knew there was even a slight possibility that they were in danger.

  Obviously, my family was included in this group; so were Neil deGrasse Tyson, Issa Rae, and whoever was in charge of the Merriam-Webster Twitter account; three of my good friends from college and the little old lady in my building back in DC—who made me enchiladas on Tuesdays—were lumped into this crowd; and to a mixture of surprise and well-of-course-he-is, so was Roscoe Winston.

  I was beginning to suspect—a hypothesis, not yet a theory—that my affection for Roscoe hadn’t ended when he’d cut off communication, but rather had lain dormant within me, biding its time, just waiting for him to make contact again.

  How infernally frustrating.

  I didn’t particularly have any interest in exploring this hypothesis. I found the idea of having a case of uncontrollable affection for someone who’d ghosted me after sixteen years of best-friendship abhorrent.

  So what if he’d had a crush?

  Get over it, man.

  Best friends don’t ghost best friends.

  And what did this lingering affection say about me? Shouldn’t I feel dispassionate at best about this person?

  Besides, it really didn’t matter if my latent-Roscoe-fondness hypothesis were true, because I was leaving Green Valley ASAP. My life was in DC, my friends, my Tuesday enchiladas, my job which was my purpose and passion. Not to mention my favorite brownie pan—the kind where each square has edges—tucked away in my kitchen cabinet. This mysterious residual affection would just have to remain unresolved and dormant forever.

&
nbsp; Forever and ever.

  The end.

  That’s all, folks.

  Therefore, instead of watching Roscoe’s truck travel closer and fretting about what was going to happen this weekend every time I accidentally-on-purpose popped up wherever he happened to be, I flipped open my latest copy of Journal of Forensic Sciences and scanned the table of contents.

  Forensics instead of fretting.

  Two articles immediately caught my attention. The first dealt with obtaining DNA from fingerprint lifts, and the second was entitled, “An Exceptional Case of Acute Respiratory Failure Caused by Intra-Thoracic Gastric Perforation Secondary to Overeating.”

  What the heck?

  Morbidly curious, I immediately found the second article and glommed the entire thing, happy to be distracted from my maddeningly contradictory thoughts and feelings for Roscoe Winston.

  But when I glanced up some time later, my gaze focusing on the GPS coordinates of Roscoe’s current location, my heart faltered. His truck had driven past his family’s house, past Green Valley, and was now headed up the mountain.

  Where is he going?

  Grabbing my gear, I gave myself a pat-down—keys, gun, flashlight, phone, tracker—and left the safe house. One eye on the tracking screen and one eye on the road, I followed his path up the mountain, frowning when I saw he’d stopped some forty minutes outside of town.

  Wracking my brain, I almost pulled over so I could check Google Maps, cross-reference his position. However, in a moment of acute clarity, I realized where his little dot resided.

  He’d gone to Hawk’s Field.

  In the fall, after high school football games, the field would be crawling with teenagers, making out in their cars or holding an impromptu bonfire, or both. It had the distinction of being privately owned by the Cooper Family. They also owned Cooper’s Field closer to town, which made things confusing at times. Regardless, Bell Cooper had never been especially good at keeping the gate locked at Hawk’s Field.

  Then again, Bell Cooper was a frisky older lady whose exploits were legendary. She and my grandfather lived in the same “mature adults” village in town, and I’d had to suffer through their flirting often when I visited.