Drowning Barbie

by Frederick Ramsay

  “But I didn’t and I won’t and he knows it. Maybe you should instead. You could sing in the choir, be an altar boy or something.”

  “I don’t think they’re called altar boys in the Episcopal church and aside from being Jewish and not baptized, a status I assume to be a precondition for membership, I can’t carry a tune in a basket.”

  “I’ve heard that choir. You’d fit right in. Is there a reason we are planning this now? I mean we’ve only been back a few days and the craziness we got ourselves into up in Maine has leaked into the grapevine. People are full of that, not what our plans are.”

  “Two reasons. Abe and Dolly want us out for Sunday dinner. That would be lunch anywhere else, but the traditional, big heart attack meal of the week is always served around noon on Sunday at Chez Schwartz. We have not been invited for our company. They will ask, they will probe, and they will have it out of us unless we have something else to discuss. Also, my people are pestering me. We need to stop the questions.”

  “Then I guess we should meet with Fisher before Sunday so we will have something to report.”

  “I’ll call him and set up a time. Send me your ‘can’t make it’ times and I’ll see what we can do.”

  “What about tonight?” Ruth said.

  “Tonight? Sorry, tonight what?”

  “I am getting the stink eye from some of my more traditional faculty and one or two board members. They find the sight of the town’s top cop slouching in my house after dark for what they fantasize as unbridled sex unacceptable.”

  “I don’t slouch and they wouldn’t if you hadn’t refused to be bridled for so long.”

  “You know what I mean. And if I stay over at your poor excuse for an apartment, I have to sneak back home like a naughty school girl hoping her parents didn’t notice she’d been out all night with a boy. Can sex with a bride be considered anything but bridled?”

  “Good question. Do horses have unbridled sex, do you suppose?”

  “Enough already. What about it? Where do we go tonight?”

  “I think tonight, I don’t slouch and you don’t sneak. We go our separate ways and live chastely, at least in public, until we get the Reverend Fisher to sanctify our union.”

  “How long can you manage celibacy?”

  “Two or three days ought to do it. Over the weekend we can go to the A-frame and shed our bridles to our hearts’ content.”

  “You’re sure about that, because I have that desk full of paperwork to tackle and having you off the premises would make it go more quickly.”

  “You have my assurance that I am fine with it. Maybe we could do a little heavy necking on the way to your house, though.”

  “When was the last time you made it in the backseat of a car?”

  “Before your time.”

  “You mean you did? With who? Never mind, I don’t want to know.”

  “A lifetime ago and it was all about teenaged hormones, both hers and mine, that prompted it. The question is, do I really want to invite a leg cramp and pulled muscles wrestling with my wife in the backseat of a Buick?”

  “And?”

  “Just think what we can tell our grandchildren.”

  “Now you are getting ahead of yourself. So, changing the subject—how was your day? Murder and mayhem?”

  “Murder, yes. Andy Lieux’s dog found a woman taking a dirt nap out in the woods and then when she was lifted out we found another corpse sharing the same twelve square feet of parkland. Two dead people separated by perhaps a decade and stacked, you could say, like cord wood. Not something you generally run across.”

  “Two? Holy cow, Ike you are back on the job less than a week and people start dropping like flies. You are worse than the plague.”

  “Worse than?”

  “Okay, not worse. So, who are they?”

  “I don’t know much except the ME says the woman has been dead less than a week, the other corpse is male and has been there at least ten years. I doubt they’re connected but it did seem odd digging up one body and discovering it nestled on top of another.”

  “Two dead people spooning in a grave but buried ten years apart?”

  “About ten, yes.”

  “Maybe they were husband and wife and she outlived him and her last wish was to be buried with the love of her life.”

  “Her head was bashed in. I doubt her killer had her last wishes in mind when he whacked her with a tree limb.”

  “You never know. Okay, I will send my available dates and times to you, and you will set up something with The Reverend Fisher ASAP. We will go to Abe and Dolly’s for Sunday gorging and…Oh, I have it, we’ll invite my mother to join us and kill two birds with one turkey dinner.”

  “Don’t say kill. I’ve had a day full of that. Are you finished?”

  “Done. Pay the bill, Handsome, and then I’ll race you to the car. Where shall we park to play teenagers? The quarry or the dark end of the parking lot at Callend?”

  “It’s Tuesday and a school night. The quarry will have fewer teenagers than the parking lot will have students.”

  “The quarry it is. Wow, I really am behaving like a naughty school girl.”

  “Maybe you could put on a uniform. You know, plaid skirt, white blouse, bobby socks—”

  “Bobby socks? What the hell are bobby socks?”

  “Sorry, wrong century. It comes from watching too many old movies on TV. Short white socks.”

  “Sorry, I left my school uniform at the cleaners. You’ll have to make do with my power suit and sensible flats. I’ll ditch my pantyhose in the ladies’ room on the way out.”

  Chapter Five

  Ike plunked down in the only comfortable chair in his rented apartment. The two of them had driven to the quarry as planned and, like the teenagers they weren’t, had attempted some heavy petting in the front seat, not the back. It didn’t work. It didn’t work because, in fact, neither of them were teenagers anymore and hadn’t been for much too long. It didn’t work because the press of real work and duty distracted them from the moment, and because…hell, all those adult concerns push in and stifle whatever spontaneity they might have enjoyed. Ruth took care of him in a less athletic manner and he had driven her home. He had the sense that Ruth had more on her mind than just work, but Ruth was Ruth and she would work through it.

  He let his gaze wander around his apartment. Ruth had said “poor excuse of an apartment.” She was right, of course. He’d rented it when he had been elected sheriff. The drive into town from the mountains where he had his A-frame took too long to be convenient and was too tricky when the snow fell and iced the roads. The apartment’s two rooms, kitchenette, and bath had come furnished. In the intervening years he’d added little to the décor. He had a bookcase of his favorites. Ike did not collect books. He figured if he had no plans to ever read the thing a second time, he’d pass it on to someone who might. His bookcase contained, then, a couple of dozen volumes, mostly nonfiction and two-thirds of them biographies of leaders, famous and infamous. He’d purchased a flat-screen TV which had not yet been connected to cable. He used it to watch old movies he streamed from Netflix and rented DVDs. Also he had some plates, pots and pans, and a second small freezer he kept stocked with frozen dinners, and that was pretty much it. So, aside from the books, there was precious little to move over to the president’s cottage. Actually, “cottage” diminished the building. “Mansion” more nearly covered it. Downstairs was largely given over to receptions and meetings. Ruth occupied an apartment carved out of the upstairs. It was barely larger than his, although there were guest rooms for visiting dignitaries. Fitting in the bookcase might be a challenge.

  The larger question resonated around the minutia of marriage and cohabitation. Did he really want to share a bathroom? Was he ready for things like loofahs and body wash on the tub’s sill? He was a bar soap man and thing
s that came out of squeeze bottles made him nervous. Was she the sort who would use his razor in places and for purposes it was not designed? The truth about marriage and its many failures, he thought had more to do with the everyday frictions over trivia, than any lack of passion, love, or communication.

  He sat back and ran the thought through his head once again and laughed. Bullshit. You adjusted or you installed a second bath—problem solved. Marriage was a state he’d only tasted, never completely devoured. He’d leave heavy analysis to Abigail Van Buren.

  Charlie Garland called Ike around midnight.

  “So, you have done the deed.”

  “Which deed would that be, Charlie?”

  “Las Vegas, the Budding Rose Wedding Chapel. That deed.”

  “Is there anything about me you do not know? Charlie, if I didn’t know you better, I’d swear you’re having a bromance with me and that thought is really scary. Why in hell were you snooping into my time in the west?”

  “I am your guardian angel, your Clarence. I wanted to get my wings. Your wedding bells secured them for me.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a Wonderful Life, don’t you remember? Jimmy Stewart, or rather George Bailey thinks all is lost, his career as the town do-gooder finished and—”

  “I got it. You as Clarence Odbody, the postulant angel, is way too much of a stretch, Charlie. You are the villainous Henry Potter, if you are anybody.”

  “I am wounded. I have to ask, are you ready for this move?”

  “Ready? How do you mean?”

  “You were a single guy for a long time. Then, you married Eloise after what…a twenty-minute romance?”

  “It wasn’t twenty minutes.”

  “Close. Eloise died and Ruth helped you heal. Are you sure that isn’t all there is to this latest move?”

  “Charlie, you are not my mother, you are not even a good psychologist. Stop prying.”

  “Very well, if you insist. Moving along, the director wants to know if your nuptials will temper Ruth’s chronic enmity toward the nation’s select service. If so, does this raise the possibility that you could be tempted to help us out on, say, a consultant basis from time to time?”

  “The contrary, my friend. At her request and my concurrence, you have been removed from my speed dial. Your name may not be spoken in her presence. You are permanently banned from the premises. Before you ask, that is because she dislikes being caught in a cross fire especially when the bullets are real. She wishes never to be so again. And so say I. Done and done, Charlie.”

  “You two are annoyed. I understand and I am sorry about that. I will take it, then, that you are temporarily out of the loop.”

  “Not temporarily.”

  “We’ll see.” Charlie hung up. Ike sighed and thought of Bruce Willis and Helen Mirren and RED and wondered if there was ever an ending to a career foolishly begun in the darker reaches of the CIA.

  More importantly, now that Charlie had resurrected it, had Ike finally said goodbye to Eloise’s ghost?

  ***

  Ruth believed she handled stress about as well as anyone she knew, except Ike. Her cure was to do more. That is, if work stressed her out, she’d just work harder. If something in her private life, her not work life, caused her to pause, she simply pushed on through. Truth be told, that part of her life had been anything but stressful. Her relationship with Ike, which had started out about as oddly as any, had over time found a comfortable place, a rhythm. It could have gone on forever just as it was. But it wasn’t going to—not now. Las Vegas and tequila had seen to that. So, a new game. Until now, the faculty, confronted with their coupling had, as a whole, managed with varying success to look the other way. Long before Ike appeared on their doorstep, they had bought into the de rigueur notion of “celebrating diversity.” Most of them had done so as a knee-jerk response to the then-fashionable idea. None had actually considered what it meant beyond recruiting the occasional minority student—Latino, African American, gay, and so on—whatever the social imperative suggested to be important at any moment in time. All agreed that it was a good thing they did and so they “celebrated.”

  Having their PhD, DLitt president sleeping with the town sheriff, however, forced some of them to rethink their early subscription to the concept. Somehow, Ike and Ruth as a couple, a sexually active couple, didn’t fit the broader intent. Yet, objecting to Ruth’s choice exposed in them a level of hypocrisy which they found difficult to internalize. So, they looked the other way and hoped in time the whole affair would just go away. It hadn’t. Ruth had dealt with this as with everything else. She soldiered on, daring anyone to say something. No one had.

  That was then and this is now. It was one thing to be perceived as having a fling with a “townie,” as one or two of her students did each year, and more than one faculty member did as well. But those flings were considered anomalies and not to be taken seriously. For Ruth to flaunt the norms of her “class” by actually marrying the man created a wholly different problem. She had not found an easy way to work through that. Her relationship with Ike could no longer be allowed to be viewed as a mere trifle, a whim, or a peccadillo, on her part, even when in fact it never really was. She’d permitted that camouflage to exist when she knew in her heart it was essentially disingenuous. Now it would no longer disguise anything. She had stepped over the line and the man many of her people viewed as “the hick” would soon be moving into the president’s cottage permanently.

  And for this, she felt stress. Even an old divorce years before did not leave her in such a state. Sometimes while in the shower or lying in bed late at night when sleep eluded her, she thought about what it would be like when the two of them reached this place in their relationship. At those times she had difficulty catching her breath. She knew she wanted Ike more than anything—didn’t she? She did, but…

  “What’s wrong with me?” she’d mutter to the shower head or the ceiling. “I told Ike I’ve wanted this since…” Then she would recall the night up in the mountains. He’d just finished telling her about Eloise, his bride of a hundred days, accidently killed by an assassin in Switzerland. She’d heard the pain in his voice and his plea for understanding and wondered at the man who in spite of her bitchy behavior had been supportive during an extremely difficult time in her life.

  “I don’t know if I should cry or be angry” she’d said to him at the time, “and here’s something else for you to think about, I think you are the most irritating, engaging, infuriating, attractive man I have ever met.” And, that said, she’d stepped up and kissed him. “Smooched” him, she’d described it in their Las Vegas hotel room, wearing nothing but an overlarge bath towel. My God, how far they’d come. She smiled at the image. Not much had really changed since that early beginning. Nothing about Ike, that is. He could still be irritating and engaging, infuriating and attractive. And lately, she found him to be the coolest man in a tight spot she’d ever known or imagined.

  Now, things had to change. They were no longer playmates. Their sandbox days were over. No more necking out at the quarry…well actually, that hadn’t worked out too well. The two superannuated teenagers would have to settle into adulthood. And when they went public, there could be no turning back. She took a deep breath. They’d manage it, somehow.

  Second thoughts? No, none. They’d figure it out.

  Chapter Six

  Essie looked up from her dispatch desk and raised one eyebrow. The clock read 7:45, early for Ike under any circumstance. He backed in the door, a box under each arm.

  “An improvement of which everyone will approve,” Ike said in response to her unasked question. “Clear the stuff off the table in the corner.”

  “That’s the coffee corner, Ike. What kind of improvement comes from dumping the coffee pot?”

  “A great deal, trust me. Just do it.” He put the boxes on the floor next to the table wh
ile Essie began moving the coffeemaker, jars containing sweeteners and lightener.

  “Where do these go?”

  “The pot in the trash, the other stuff on the empty desk. That reminds me. Did you post the job opening on the town website?”

  “I did and in the journals and all the other places you wrote down. Why are you chucking the coffeepot? Have the food police finally arrived?”

  “In the first place, it’s not a pot exactly. It’s a very tired old urn. It is going because I am no longer willing to risk life, limb, and tooth enamel on the stuff that pours out of its spout. I am replacing it with modern technology.”

  “Like what?”

  “K-Cups.”

  “Whose cups?”

  Ike unpacked the two boxes and placed a K-Cup coffee brewer on the table and handed Essie a plastic container he detached from its side. “Here, fill this tank with water, then watch and learn.”

  He opened the second box and pulled out one of the cups.

  Once the tank had been filled and the brewer plugged in, he loaded the small covered cup into the receiver, tapped the start button, and the machine groaned, gurgled, and hissed out a single cup of coffee. He added his creamer and a half package of sweetener and took a sip.

  “Every cup fresh and, even better, making coffee will no longer be on your job description.”

  “It never was. I just did it because the department is full up with out-of-date macho guys who can’t or won’t, and I got tired of the whining. Makes me wonder how you manage to catch the bad guys. ”

  “A pungent observation. Score one for you. And you’re welcome. Now all you need to do is teach those macho whiners how to do this and make sure the last one to empty the tank refills it. So, no more liquid asphalt, burned, or industrial-strength coffee. Now ditch that piece of crap that used to be an unhealthy part of our lives.”

  Frank Sutherlin, who served as acting sheriff when Ike was off duty, had entered the room and listened to this last exchange. “Can it make tea too?”