by J. F. Margos
“I was beginning to wonder if I was going to have to get the smelling salts.”
I shielded my eyes with my hands and squinted so I could see his face.
“What are you talking about?”
“I thought maybe you had some kind of spell.”
“Don’t be smart. I just fell asleep.”
“Well, how many ‘mature’ women spend the night on the patio sleeping on an Adirondack? Then there are all these mugs and bottles…”
“Root beer, smarty, and you know it.”
He was chuckling now and enjoying every minute of it.
“I’m sure you’ve never done anything like this,” I said as I struggled to sit up straight and regain part of my dignity.
“Mario, you’re not looking so speedy this morning.”
I backhanded him in the leg.
“Watch your mouth.”
Mario was his nickname for me—after Mario Andretti. I had acquired this moniker on account of my love for a fast car with a stick shift and an open road on which to drive it. Sometimes my right foot would become very heavy, especially if the road was really open.
He chuckled. “So, what’s the occasion?”
“I had a bad afternoon yesterday. What are you doing here so early anyway?”
“I came by to see what kind of progress you were making on the bust of our Red Bud victim.”
“I was working on it, and then Irini called.”
“Theia Irini?”
He used the Greek word in referring to his “Aunt Irene.” Irini had been our close friend since before Michael was born, and he had grown up with her around and being a part of our extended family in faith. She was his godmother. He had learned to speak some Greek, too, and he did a pretty good job.
“Yes,” I said.
“What’s wrong? Is Greg okay?”
Greg was one of Mike’s best friends.
“Gregory is fine.”
“What then?”
I sighed and put my head in my hands, running my fingers through my short, graying red hair. I looked up at Michael.
“CILHI thinks it has Ted’s remains.”
Mike sank into the chair next to me.
“Wow.”
We looked at each other.
“So, what’s the rest, Mom?”
“Not enough teeth for a dental ID and nothing to compare the DNA with, but the skull is in decent enough shape.”
Mike looked down at the ground between his feet.
“Whew.” He paused a moment and then looked over at me. “So, what’re you going to do?”
“Well, I’ve committed to it. I have to, no matter how I feel about it.”
Mike nodded. He reached over and squeezed my right shoulder. “It’s the right thing, Mom. Anything I can do?”
“Be here.”
“You got it.”
We sat there a moment in silence.
“Hey, Mom?”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t believe you fell asleep on one of these hard wood chairs.”
“Hey, Mike?”
“Yeah.”
“I fell asleep on one of these hard wood chairs.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“You’re welcome.”
Chapter Five
After my little campout on the patio, I decided I needed to get my rear into gear before I was going to be able to get my head together. One of the rooms in my house is set aside as a weight room with a bench and rack and a couple of machines for back and leg work, a roman chair for abs and low back and a pulley set up for more arm and chest work.
I suited up in my black cotton sweatpants and racerback top and did a fifteen-minute warm-up on the recumbent stationary bike. Thoroughly warmed up, I did a full set of stretches and hit the weights. I hadn’t been in the gym for days, so I went at it hard, doing a full-body workout, supersetting everything for maximum cardio benefit. When I was done with that, I got back on the recumbent bike and did another thirty minutes.
I was dripping in sweat when I was done, but I felt a hundred percent better—mentally and physically. I got into a steaming-hot shower and washed everything out of my system—at least temporarily.
Refreshed from my exercise and hot shower, I put on a clean pair of jeans and socks, a white cotton T-shirt and my favorite pointy-toed boots and went to the studio.
I sat on the stool in front of my drafting table and began to make a list of everything I would need to take with me to Hawaii. I would need a case in which to carry the cast I would make of the skull. I began to list other tools and supplies to pack.
I sat back and took a deep breath. Who was I kidding? What I would need most of all was the spiritual fortitude to face this task and all that it meant to me. I would need that to go back into the jungles of Vietnam in my mind.
I set my pen down on the drafting board and got the phone instead. It was time to call Reverend Iordani. I needed to walk and talk.
When Jack died from a sudden and unexpected heart attack six years ago, my world came apart like a house of cards. Reverend Iordani used to walk with me along the riverbank under the cypress trees. I don’t remember much of it. Life for me then existed in a fog, but I remembered the cypress trees and their peaceful effect.
I sat on a bench under the great spreading branches of one of those peaceful trees and waited. True to form and ten minutes late—they call it Greek time—Reverend Iordani came strolling down a grassy bank that led from the street to the trail along the river. He beamed at me and waved.
I got up and began to walk toward him. I kissed his hand and then we greeted in the traditional Greek way with the exchange of three kisses. As we began to walk, we talked about my two most recent cases: the woman under the cottonwoods and the one just discovered upriver on Red Bud Isle. Reverend Iordani listened carefully, complimented me on my hard work and efforts and asked me about Mike.
Then he stopped under a large tree and said, “Toni, this isn’t why you called me, so tell me what this is really about.”
“Irini called me the other day. They think they’ve found Ted’s remains in Vietnam.”
The reverend knew all about Ted. Irini lived just outside of town in Dripping Springs, and she came to our church. He knew Irini well.
“Wow,” he almost whispered. He said, “May his memory be eternal.”
He had a hushed sound to his voice—a peaceful, calm demeanor. All of this was part of his normal way, but now it was more pronounced.
“They can’t make a positive ID on his remains for a lot of reasons, but there’s enough of the skull for a reconstruct,” I told him.
“That’s the only way they’ll know for sure?”
I nodded and looked down at my feet, making curlicue shapes in the dirt with the tip of my boot.
The reverend raised his eyebrows, stroked his close-cut beard and said simply, “I see.”
We made our way to a bench a few feet down the trail. Reverend Iordani’s counsel had helped me heal many wounds—wounds from ’Nam, wounds from difficult cases and wounds from Jack’s death. The reverend was twenty years younger than me and still raising his children, but he had spiritual wisdom, and it was wisdom I needed right now. We sat and began to talk about what I had been told about Ted’s remains. When I had finished with all of it, the reverend took another deep breath.
“Well, of course you have to do it,” he said.
I nodded. “I know that, but I need help to get through it. To go to Vietnam again, so to speak.”
He nodded. “Toni, you’re a spiritual person. I know you read the scripture and keep a strict rule of meditative prayer. I also know that you read the works of the spiritual fathers and continue to expand your knowledge of our faith, but there’s one thing I notice about you lately.”
I waited a moment for him to gather his thoughts.
He spoke slowly and softly, “All the work you do is great work. Your work is bringing peace to a lot of people and their relatives who are still on
this side of life, but you never interact with any of these people anymore.”
“What do you mean, Reverend?”
“Toni, you’ve become disconnected from the living in the results of your service. It seems now your only connection is what you do for the dead. You were able to deal with the things you experienced in Vietnam by focusing on your service there, on its results and by focusing on others. Many times you’ve told me the stories of the relatives of the soldiers and how much it meant to them that you had been there when their loved ones died.”
“I know.”
“With this work you do, I think you’ve found a way lately to anesthetize yourself from that a little.”
“I see what you mean,” I said. It was hard to hear, but I realized that what he said was true. It was easier to deal with the pain of what I had seen and done in Vietnam and in my work here by distancing myself from it.
“Now it’s hitting close to home again with Teddy,” Reverend Iordani continued. “It’s hitting close to home and your thoughts are about what it will mean to you and what you will go through. Focus needs to be redirected to Irini, Gregory and Eleni, and what it will mean to them to finally have this resolved. Your service to others is the focus—away from yourself and to the needs of those you serve. It is only through selflessness that we can heal our internal pain.”
“Yes,” I said, looking down at the crushed granite on the trail. I pushed some of it around with the toe of my boot. Easier to say and to understand than to do.
He placed his hand gently on mine.
“I want you to go with me this afternoon. I have a visit to make to a local seniors’ home. I want you to meet some people.”
Maria Pappas was seventy-eight and her husband, George, was eighty-two. They were both small, frail people. Maria was only about five-one and George was maybe five-four, tops. They both had thick, dark, coarse hair peppered lightly with gray. George didn’t know anybody anymore and couldn’t do anything for himself. He lived at Riverview Assisted Living. Maria lived there with him and waited on him hand and foot. She had to do everything for him.
Their little apartment was very nicely decorated. It consisted of a sitting room and a kitchenette with a small table and two chairs, a bedroom and a bath. It was small, but Maria had made it warm and cozy with her furniture. Many beautiful pictures hung on the walls around us. An old and well-used Bible rested on a table near the door.
Reverend Iordani said some special prayers and then we all sat down in the sitting room to visit. Unhampered by the kitchenette’s limited resources, Maria had made us a wonderful snack of koulouria—Greek butter cookies—served us Greek coffee, took care of all of George’s needs, and all of ours. I tried to help her, as did Reverend Iordani, but she wouldn’t have it. At seventy-eight, she had more energy then I did thirty years ago.
She spoke of the past, the good times with George. Her hands trembled when she lifted the coffee cup. She spent the entire visit reminiscing about those days. If George made a sound or moved, she attended to him immediately. I saw then that there was fatigue there, too, but she would not and could not give up. Something inside her gave her that energy—the energy to continue. Her energy came from love—selfless love.
Reverend Iordani was right. I had become disconnected. In turning too inward, I had become selfish with my service. Suddenly it occurred to me—watching Maria tend to George and listening to her talk about their old days together—I thought about Irini trapped in those days of Vietnam all this time, never able to fully move on. To move on would be to leave Teddy there, and she could never leave Teddy alone, any more than Maria Pappas would leave George. This wasn’t just about freeing Ted, it was about freeing Irini—and Irini could never be free until Ted came home where she knew he would be safe forever.
Chapter Six
I had laid down the initial layer of clay on the Red Bud victim and had stepped back to check it all over. I would leave for Hawaii in less than a week. I wanted to get this sculpture completed before I left, so photos of the face could be disseminated on television and in the papers, and a possible ID made while I was gone.
The face was round, with broad cheeks that had a slight flatness to them. The nose was short, narrow at the bridge and then flaring to become much wider toward the end. Her brow line was straight from the nose bridge, only arching slightly over the eyes. Her rounded face circled the broad cheeks to a soft, small chin. It wasn’t a glamorous or particularly remarkable face, but it was a sweet one. I was getting to know her and beginning to feel an even greater sorrow at thinking how this lovely woman could have been killed and dumped this way.
I was now at the stage where the intuitive part of my work would begin. The science of tissue depths had been applied to all areas of the face. Normally, I would take into account clothing found with the victim and any other personal articles to give me an impression of the person as I finalized the face, but in this case, there was nothing but a jumble of bones in a makeshift grave, and one sad scrap of flowered cloth.
I thought about what Leo had said about the grave site and the method of death, and about the kind of killing she thought it was. This woman’s identity would tell us a lot about her life, with whom she might have been involved, or who she would have encountered that could have done this to her. Who was she and where had she been buried for those years before she turned up on the river’s edge at Red Bud Isle? Were it not for an early-morning kayaker, her bones would have washed down the Colorado River in anonymity.
I sat on the stool in front of my workbench just looking at the bust as it was. I sat there in my blue-jean cutoffs and an old, faded red T-shirt, with my bare feet propped up on the rungs of the stool. I let the image of the face as it was permeate my thoughts until I felt that I could “see” the person as she had been—until I could feel something of who she was.
When I look at faces I see shapes and the way those shapes come together to form the image of that person. Most eyewitnesses’ identifications of criminals are faulty, not only because of suggestions that might have been made, but mostly because of the way most people observe other people. They “snapshot” the view and then they do something that totally distorts the memory—they make a judgment about what they saw. They form an opinion.
I decided, based on my years of experience with faces, how I thought her eyes and nose should look—on the aspect of her expression. I had to breathe some artistic life into the static clay reconstruct. I would work through the night to finish this one. I would have to add more clay to smooth the features of the face across the tissue-depth markers, without adding any depth that would distort the image. At the same time, some knowledge and experience would come into play to interpret what had been there before she died. It would be early morning before I was through with all that, but there would be time to catch up on sleep on the way to Hawaii next week. Meanwhile, there was hard work to be done and a lost woman to be found.
Drew Smith had called and asked if he could come by. There was a development in our Cottonwood case. I told him to come on over, and I went into the kitchen to put on a pot of tea. I checked the cookie jar and discovered that my son had managed to actually leave some of my sugar cookies there. There were enough for Drew and me to share while we drank our tea. I decided to brew a really good green tea with jasmine. It was one I had discovered recently and I thought Drew might like it. He was a real tea drinker, and it was difficult for me to find something original for him to drink.
While the water heated to a boil, I went into the other room to put on something more decent than cutoffs and a faded old T-shirt. I changed into a pair of good jeans and a black round-neck knit top.
The whistle on the teapot began to go off just as the doorbell rang. I turned down the fire on the stove and went to the door. Drew stood on my front porch in jeans and a red golf shirt with a blue windbreaker over it, and a manila file in his hand.
“Casual attire?” I said.
“Officially off duty t
oday.”
“Oh. So, of course you’re working on your day off.”
“Contrary to popular titles, death does not take any holidays.”
I smiled and motioned for him to come in. He looked toward the kitchen and sniffed thoughtfully, a question in his brow.
“Green tea with jasmine,” I said.
He smiled. “Now, that’s a new one for me.”
Yes! I thought. Out loud I said, “And my homemade sugar cookies.”
Drew shook his head and smiled. “Now, Toni, you are going to just spoil me.”
“It gets better,” I said. “It’s your mama’s recipe for the cookies.”
“Oh no. I hope you don’t have very many of them, because I have just managed to take off five pounds I gained from slacking off at the gym last month. I had to work out double time for two solid weeks. If you’ve got Mama’s sugar cookies, I could regain the whole five pounds in one sitting.” And then he laughed.
Now I shook my head. “Well, lucky for you, my son was over here the other day and he polished off quite a few of them before I managed to run him off.”
“Thank goodness,” he chuckled. “All the time at the gym will not be wasted now.”
He smiled that great smile with his gentle overbite. Drew had married when he was twenty-one and divorced before he was twenty-seven. His wife had left him for someone else. Drew said it was because she couldn’t handle his police work—he had been a state trooper then. Still, I wondered what that crazy woman must have been thinking. Drew was a treasure. I hated to be a matchmaker, but I just knew there must be a nice young woman out there for him somewhere.
I plated the cookies and poured our tea. Drew laid the file on the table and took off his windbreaker, hung it on the back of his chair and waited. He would never sit down until all the ladies in the room were seated. I sat and then he sat. I made a mental note to look much harder to find a nice girl for him. He would have been embarrassed to know that, but he would never know. I could be sneaky when I wanted to be.