Reagan's Ashes

by Jim Heskett

  She had a cousin who was acting strangely and had inserted himself into her backpacking trip with vague claims of support, but he hadn’t been supportive at all. The only conclusion that felt right was that Dalton somehow knew about this key. That seemed impossible, because how on earth could he have known what Dad put inside his urn before he died? Unless Dalton himself had put the key in the urn, but that made no sense at all.

  And how was Charlie involved in all that? Her youngest cousin seemed to have no malice in him.

  Didn’t matter. What mattered was the here and now, and Reagan had to prepare herself for the possibility that something bad was about to happen. Now was the time to take action.

  She slid on her cargo pants, which were still a little damp, and numbingly cold. She should have stuffed them down into her sleeping bag so her body could have warmed them, but the thought hadn’t occurred to her last night.

  She opened her pack and found the reflective Mylar emergency blanket. If she needed to run, ditching her pack would make her more mobile, and having the crinkly heat-reflecting blanket might save her life. The package was barely bigger than a pack of cigarettes, and she stuffed that in one cargo pocket. She made sure the key was in the other pocket, and added her Swiss Army knife and car keys.

  She held the urn. Too bulky to fit in a pocket. She rummaged through the pack to retrieve the last of her duct tape. After raising her shirt, she pressed the urn against her stomach and the duct tape made skritch skritch skritch sounds as she unspooled it and rolled it around her body. The urn created a football-sized bump in the front but wasn’t too noticeable under the baggy technical t-shirt.

  Her cousins stirred in their tent. Running out of time.

  The food was in the bear box, nestled at a park-required two hundred feet away from camp. As soon as possible, she needed to sneak some granola bars into her pockets.

  Whatever might happen today, Reagan was prepared for the worst.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  8:15 am

  Spoon woke to a knocking at the door. During those few seconds when reality mingled with the dream-world, he reckoned he was in Austin and Reagan was coming home from a night shift waiting tables. Then he opened his eyes and noticed what he was staring at couldn’t be home. At their apartment, the ceiling was covered with a bumpy texture Reagan called “popcorn.” This ceiling was smooth.

  He sat up. Denver. More knocking.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  The door opened and there stood Anne, fully dressed, with keys in hand. “I have to go see Mitchell’s father. I thought you might like to come.”

  Spoon twisted his half-awake head toward the clock on the nightstand. Just past eight. “Who?”

  “I have to go to Boulder. Thought you might like to meet your girlfriend’s grandfather, if you have nothing better to do today. I’ll give you a minute to get dressed.”

  She shut the door and Spoon threw back the covers. He must have slept too long because he felt the same lingering dehydration of a hangover. Fortunately, he hadn’t experienced one of those in three years.

  He readied his crutches and circled the room to pick up his clothes from yesterday. Spoon was the kind of person who usually liked to start the day with a wake-up shower and then coffee to kick the day into gear. Although he had never gotten to like weak American coffee, he at least tolerated it and found that if he drank enough, the caffeine eventually took hold.

  No shower today, though. As he pulled on his shirt, he contemplated whether he actually did want to meet Reagan’s grandfather. He probably should be trying to find out more about that Tyson bloke, or the man who had followed him around town yesterday, but he had no leads. He could go back to the Slinky Grape across the street from the lawnmower shop for more observation, but then he’d still have the same problem. What to do next?

  Maybe sticking close to Anne was the best way to protect her and uncover more pieces of the puzzle. If she was going to Boulder, that’s where he should be too.

  He slipped on his trousers and shoes, and then met Anne at the foot of the stairs. She wouldn’t look him in the eye, and he didn’t blame her. Since she’d attempted to seduce him on the couch yesterday, she’d been distant and strange. He still didn’t know what to do about all that. Pretending it hadn’t happened had seemed to work okay so far.

  “So, what are we doing?” he said.

  “Mitchell left his father this in the will. Some old baseball cards or something,” she said, holding up a rusted tin. “Since he was in surgery on the day of the service and has been bed-ridden since then, I have to drive up to Boulder and deliver them. Are you up to speed now?”

  “Got it.”

  “I can’t tell you it’s going to be a pleasant experience. He’s a cranky old man and he’s never been shy about telling me I wasn’t good enough for his son. So we’re going to get in, drop this off, and get out. Do you still want to go?”

  Maybe he could get Anne talking about Tyson again. “Yes.”

  Spoon followed her to the neighbor’s car and eased into the passenger seat. As they drove the half hour to Boulder, she quizzed him about kangaroos, sharks, crocodiles, and other Australian lore. He told her the story of the drop-bear, the mythical koala-like beast with fangs that locals claimed lived in trees and dropped on unsuspecting tourists. She almost bought it, but he couldn’t keep a straight face.

  She didn’t want to talk about Tyson, though.

  There was no mention of the incident on the couch from the day before, which was fine with Spoon. As his father would say, she’d been pissed as a parrot, and Spoon had made plenty of mistakes after sucking back a few too many stubbies during his drinking days. The big question was how much to tell Reagan about it. He didn’t want to lie to her, but he also didn’t know what good the knowledge would do her. As soon as she came back, they would be on a plane to Texas, and they didn’t ever have to see Anne again unless they wanted to.

  Driving into Boulder required them to pass through the little towns of Broomfield and then Louisville, which Anne pointed out was pronounced differently than the one in Kentucky. He wasn’t aware that America had so many cities they had to reuse the names in different states. To pass Louisville and get into Boulder, they climbed a steep hill, and as soon as they broached the other side, Spoon’s mouth dropped open. Boulder sat in a massive valley at the foot of towering green peaks. Whilst he could see the mountains from Denver, the starkness of the difference in this closeup view blew his mind.

  They parked at an Assisted Living center on the edge of town. It would have looked like a regular two-story apartment complex, were it not for the sign out front. A wrinkled old lady pushing a walker crept across the parking lot.

  They entered the office in the center of the complex and Anne approached a woman wearing scrubs, seated behind a counter. Framed prints of smiling pensioners adorned the walls of the office. The room smelled of cleaning products and flowers.

  When Anne asked to see Frank Darby, the woman in the scrubs placed a phone call, and then Spoon and Anne were on their way through the complex.

  They stopped short of knocking on the door.

  “He’s still recovering from shoulder surgery and may be loopy on whatever pain meds they’ve got him on,” she said. “Plus, he has early-stage Alzheimer's, so don’t get offended if he can’t remember your name, or if he does something odd. Last time I was here, he threw a shoe at me. Fair warning.”

  Spoon pictured a barking loony on the other side of that door, frothing at the mouth and flinging his shit against the wall.

  Anne knocked on the door, and a warble came from the other side. She opened it and beckoned Spoon to follow.

  Looking around the apartment, Spoon thought he’d discovered the eighth wonder of the hoarder world. Stuff was packed from floor to ceiling… knick knacks, curios, antiques. He’d been to a few American theme restaurants that hung odd objects from the walls like lacrosse paddles, street signs, stuffed animals, but none of them compar
ed to the density of junk inside this apartment. Stacks of newspapers lined the floor along the walls. Dusty art prints graced most of the available wall space, and the remaining space belonged to a collection of objects that Spoon reckoned had to do with seafaring… nautical maps, a harpoon, even a brass sextant. The sextant gleamed in the light, as if he’d taken care of it, compared to the other dusty objects on the wall.

  Stacks of clothes, trinkets, piles of empty boxes of food covered every square centimeter of horizontal space. A dollhouse sat on a stand next to the TV, and that object puzzled Spoon the most. It seemed well-maintained and relatively new.

  Frank Darby was sitting in a recliner in the living room of the one-bedroom apartment. He was next to the window, and the shades were slightly open, casting shards of light across his body. Thin and grizzled, a few days worth of gray stubble dotted his face. What remained of his hair looked patchy and messy, jutting out like mad scientist spikes.

  Spoon checked the old man for a family resemblance. He had Reagan’s nose: thin and flat at the top, then widening halfway with a slight bulb at the end.

  “Who the hell are you?” Frank said.

  Anne put a hand on Spoon’s shoulder, then yanked it away. She spoke in loud, deliberate words. “Frank, this is Reagan’s boyfriend, Spoon.”

  “Spoon?” He said as a snarl spread across his face.

  “My name’s Liam, but everyone calls me Spoon.”

  The snarl broke and Frank opened his mouth, clicking his dentures together. His eyes traveled up and down Spoon’s face. After an endless silence, he said, “hell. A man ought to call himself whatever he wants.” He waved them inside. “Come on in, you’re letting all the damn air out.”

  Aside from Frank’s recliner, one other chair sat at a tiny round dinner table. Spoon gestured Anne toward it and he sat on the bed, laying his crutches behind him.

  “How are you going today, Mr. Darby?”

  “You’re an Aussie,” Frank said.

  “That’s right,” Spoon said. Frank had even pronounced it correctly, like ozzie, and not ossie, as most Americans did.

  Frank grunted and shifted in his chair. “I spent some time in Alice Springs after Korea.”

  Anne lifted the rusted tin box and shook it. “Mitchell left you these in his will. We wanted to make sure you got them.”

  “What is it?” Frank said.

  “Baseball cards or something. He told me you helped him collect them when he was a kid.”

  Frank recoiled. “Baseball cards? I got way more crap in here than I know what to do with already. What the hell do I want with baseball cards?”

  Anne sighed and dropped the tin on the table. “I have no idea, Frank, but your son wanted you to have them, so here they are.”

  “You think you’re Little Miss Special with your fancy teas and your hippie yoga, but you would have been nothing without Mitchell. You were a barroom floozy when he met you. He gave you a good home and all you ever did was shit on him.”

  “Okay,” Anne said as she stood up and hitched her purse over her shoulder. “I’ve heard enough. Always a pleasure to see you, Frank. Glad to see living at the old folks’ home at least hasn’t dulled your wit. Spoon, let’s go.”

  “No,” Frank said. “He can stay. You wait outside while I chat with my granddaughter’s friend.”

  The idea struck Spoon that maybe Frank might know what kind of trouble Reagan’s dad had been in. A long shot, but with Anne out of the room, he could investigate.

  Anne stared at Spoon, and he shrugged in return. Playing clueless might or might not work.

  She flicked her eyes back and forth between them, checked her watch, then exited the room in a huff.

  “You ever been to Alice Springs?” Frank said once they were alone.

  “A long time ago, when I was a pup.”

  Frank smiled and cleared his throat, a strained and gurgling wet sound. “I met this young woman when I was there. Mathilda, just like the song. That was before I met Reagan’s grandmother, of course. She had blonde hair, big blue eyes, and a full figure like Jayne Mansfield. You know who that is?”

  “Name rings a bell.”

  “I wanted to marry that Mathilda, but she wouldn’t move to America, and I had a job waiting for me in Alamosa for after the war, so it didn’t work out.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Spoon said.

  “Nothing to be sorry about, son. When you get a little bit older, you’ll learn life works out the way it’s supposed to. If I hadn’t left, I wouldn’t have met my wife, we wouldn’t have had Mitchell, he wouldn’t have had Reagan, and you’d be left without a girlfriend.” He cackled.

  “That’s about the size of it, yeah,” Spoon said.

  “You and my granddaughter been going steady long?” Frank said as he narrowed his eyes.

  “A little over a year. I’m quite keen on that girl, and she doesn’t know it yet, but I plan to marry her. If she’ll have me, I suppose.”

  This lightened Frank’s hard face. “You should ask her, because my granddaughter is an exceptional girl. They don’t come along like that too often. Not like her cousins, those little miscreants.”

  “Really? Reagan has nothing but good things to say about Charlie.” He started to worry that Anne might burst in at any moment, demanding they leave. He prayed she would give him enough time to learn something useful.

  “I suppose he is. Dalton’s the troublemaker. His dad was worse. Always getting into trouble in high school, never even bothered to even look at going to college.”

  Spoon knew nothing at all about Dalton and Charlie’s father. He didn’t remember meeting anyone identified as Reagan’s uncle at the funeral, and she’d never mentioned anything about him before. Frank’s use of the past tense to describe him might have answered that question.

  Frank coughed and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Mitchell was more of a dad to those kids than their own dad ever was.”

  “I’m sorry about Mitchell. Reagan loved him heaps.”

  Frank chewed his cheek. “What do you know about him?”

  “Not much. Just what Reagan’s told me.”

  “She was always quite attached to him. There was less to love about Mitchell than you might think, although she never wanted to see the truth about him. A daddy’s girl, I heard someone say once.”

  Now they were getting somewhere. “What truth is that?”

  Frank inhaled slowly, and let out a wheeze that turned into a cough. “Not sure if I should tell you this.” He reached into his pocket and took out a lollie wrapped in foil, made a big show out of slowly unwrapping it and sticking it in his mouth. “You’re going to marry her, you say?”

  “I am indeed, Mr. Darby.”

  “Then what the hell. You should know all this, I suppose. Mitchell was a bright boy, got good grades, always popular with the girls. But then when he grew up, he got himself a taste for horses.”

  “Horses?”

  “Gambling,” Frank said. “First horses, then cards, football games, whatever.”

  Spoon took a deep breath. A gambling problem would explain all the lost money, the surprise about the will. Maybe even explained why this Tyson man was after Anne. Maybe he had lent Reagan’s dad money and now was trying to hold her accountable for the debt.

  “So Mitchell lost all the family money?”

  Frank leaned forward, which made him grimace, and then launched into a coughing fit for a few seconds. When he finished, there was a dab of blood on his chin, which he wiped onto his shirt. He beckoned Spoon to lean closer. “I heard about the will. And I know it’s a load of crap.”

  “It is?” Spoon said, checking the door to the apartment for signs of Anne.

  “Mitchell’s got money stashed. Safety deposit box down in Denver. He wanted to keep it out of Anne’s grubby fingers.”

  “How do you know that?”

  This seemed to incense Frank. “Because he told me, that’s how.” His eyes dimmed and then darted around Spoon’s fa
ce. “Mitchell wanted to get that money to Reagan, then he was going to skip town the way he always did.”

  Frank’s harsh words didn’t match up to how Reagan talked about her father. This all sounded like a bit of a yarn. “But how would he get her the money if it wasn’t in the will?”

  “Safety deposit box got to have a key, don’t it? He would have sent her the key somehow. Where is she, anyway? Why didn’t she come today?”

  “She’s backpacking in Rocky Mountain National Park.”

  “Strange time to go camping, if you ask me.”

  Spoon smiled. “True enough, mate.”

  Frank cleared his throat again, then scowled. “That money will be in cash, and there’s a lot of it. No idea how much. Enough that if he had to pay taxes, the lawyers and money-lenders would end up getting most of it. They get their grubby little fingers around it and you’re none the wiser.”

  Spoon sat back as a frown darkened his face. Until now, he’d been surprised how lucid Frank had been, given Anne’s description.

  “You think I’m joking,” Frank said, spittle flying from his lips. “First they come around, telling you how they can just hold the money for you in escrow, and they won’t let the government get it, and then they’re all there stealing it out from under you and you can’t do a damn thing about it.”

  “Mr. Darby, I don’t understand what this has to do with–”

  “And don’t even get me started about those crooks at the bank. Liars, all of them. Listening in to my phone calls like that goddamned bleeding heart liberal Governor. You know they can smoke marijuana legally in this state now like it’s all one big flower-power rally? What the hell has Colorado come to? You ask my son Mitchell, he lives down in Denver. He knows all about it.”

  Spoon’s shoulders slumped. Maybe what Frank said about the key and the safety deposit box was true. Maybe not. Maybe the ravings of an imaginative oldie with Alzheimers.

  A knock at the door. Spoon turned around as Anne leaned in.