Touching Cottonwood

by Randall Simpson

  While the mother and daughter were meeting in private, the judge had gone back upstairs to awaken his wife. During that time, the groom sat alone on the living room couch, with Yankee sitting at his feet. The head pats and scratches behind the ears the animal was receiving from the groom ensured that the two would become life-long friends.

  A short while later, the judge and his wife came downstairs, and the bride and her mother returned from the study. They all converged back in the living room at about the same time.

  The mother looked at the young man, her son-in-law to be, and smiled. “Well, whatever spell you’ve cast on her,” said the mother, “doesn’t seem to be one that I am able to break.”

  The young man stood up and hugged his future mother-in-law. “I must tell you,” he said, “that it’s really quite the other way around. If there is any spell-casting going on here tonight, it is she who has done it to me. You’ve raised an amazing woman. I feel fortunate to be loved by her and now to spend the rest of my life with her.”

  The mother turned and looked at her daughter and smiled. “I hope you’ll both forgive me, but I just didn’t have any time to go shopping for a wedding gift.”

  “Nor have we, dear,” said Gayle Reynolds, smiling and winking as she looked at the young woman. “But somehow I’m sure we’re not the only ones who will be giving you something a little after-the-fact.”

  The young woman smiled. “Actually,” she said, “there is a little something that we would like all three of you to give to us tonight as a special wedding gift. The two of us talked about this earlier tonight, and we promise it won’t cost you anything.”

  “Oh, I like that kind of gift,” said the judge. “I wish Gayle’s thousands of nieces and nephews all wanted that kind. I think we’ve sent a wedding gift every month, sometimes two, for at least the past five years. I’m wondering if some of those nieces and nephews are getting married twice or even three times, just to get more gifts.”

  Gayle smiled and shrugged her shoulders. “What can I say?” she said. “I come from a big family.”

  “Well, I think what we want is easy enough,” said the young woman. “It’s easy and maybe a bit unusual—but it’s very important to us. We’d like each of you to give us your promise not to tell anyone else in town about our marriage until we’re ready to announce it ourselves.”

  The judge, his wife, and the bride’s mother all looked puzzled.

  “You’re right, that is a little unusual,” said the mother of the bride, looking at her daughter and then the groom. “I certainly don’t have a problem with it, but do you mind if I ask why?”

  “We’d just like to keep it private for a while,” replied the bride. “We want to announce it in our own way at our own time. Can each of you promise to let us do that?”

  The three nodded in agreement to the request, and then the judge said, “Well, we can sign the marriage license in my study afterwards, but I think we can begin the ceremony anytime you are both ready.”

  The young man and woman looked at each other and held hands.

  “I think we’re ready, Your Honor,” said the young woman.

  The words the judge used to conduct the ceremony were simple and brief. At the end, there were some special words that the bride and groom had both requested to say.

  “…and even death shall not us part,” said the bride.

  “…and even death shall not us part,” said the groom.

  When it came time to put the ring on the bride’s finger, the groom did a quick search of the pockets of his pants and shirt. “Uh oh,” he said, “I think I might have dropped it earlier tonight….”

  The bride squinted at him, giving him a doubtful look.

  “That’s all right,” said the judge. “It’s only a—”

  The judge stopped suddenly as the groom raised his index finger in a manner indicating something had just occurred to him. “Yankee,” said the groom, “come here, girl.”

  The yellow lab gladly stood up and walked around the bride, thinking no doubt it was time for more head patting or behind-the-ear scratching. The groom bent down and untied something that had been attached with a small string to Yankee’s collar.

  “Good girl,” said the groom as he rewarded the dog with a gentle pat on top of her head. He then stood up, looked his new bride in the eyes, and slipped a brilliant diamond onto her finger.

  At a few minutes before midnight, standing in the living room of Judge Richard Reynolds, with Gayle Reynolds as a witness, the bride’s mother standing right behind her daughter, and a yellow lab named Yankee happily seated at her side as the maid of honor, Rebecca D’Arcy married Matthew Duncan—a man whom she loved more deeply than any other—and knew would love her more deeply and forever in return.

  Thirty-One

  Old Blind Carl’s House

  Sheriff O’Neil was less than happy with the theft of Ned Quinlan’s electric car, not only because he was once again forced to walk or ride a bike everywhere, but also because it had been Cottonwood’s only emergency-response vehicle. Its loss only added to the sheriff’s sense of urgency to get his town back to some sort of normalcy.

  More distressing to the sheriff, however, was the information Sparky had related to him regarding the events that evening at Ernie’s Diner. After hearing about public nudity, the cane, and Matthew Duncan’s involvement, Sheriff O’Neil decided to immediately begin some sort of initial search for Old Blind Carl. A blind man’s cane without a blind man attached was not something John O’Neil could rest easily on.

  The sheriff and Sparky walked the few blocks from their office to Old Blind Carl’s house. The house was dark, but the front screen door was unlocked, and the inside wooden door was wide open. Though it was late at night, this was not at all unusual, as many people in Cottonwood left their doors unlocked. It was also well-known that Old Blind Carl rarely turned his lights on at night, for an obvious reason, unless he had a sighted guest enjoying his company.

  Sheriff O’Neil knocked on the screen door. “Carl,” he said loudly through the screen. “Are you in there?” There was no reply. He tried once more, knocking and yelling inside a bit louder. Still, there was only silence.

  He and Sparky turned their flashlights on and stepped carefully inside. They scanned the walls for a light switch and located one a few feet from the door. Sparky flipped the switch up, but nothing happened. The sheriff aimed his flashlight at a small table with a lamp on it, a few feet further inside. He walked over to the table and reached for the switch on the lamp. He gave it a turn, and there was light.

  “Oh my god,” said the sheriff. “Would you look at all this crap?!”

  The small living room they were standing in was filled with knickknacks and small objects of all types. The room wasn’t dirty but merely cluttered, for from floor to nearly ceiling were shelves lined with hundreds of small knickknacks. These items were exactly the kind of miniature replicas found at any tourist shop, anywhere in the world. Carl had them all: a bobble-headed hula dancer, a Tower of London, a Pyramid of Giza, a Leaning Tower of Pisa, a St. Louis Arch, an Empire State Building, an Eiffel Tower, and on and on. Shelf upon shelf was filled with items from every major city and every major tourist attraction, from all around the globe.

  “Carl?” the sheriff yelled again, toward the back rooms of the house. “Are you here? Carl?” Again, there was no reply.

  “Old Carl just loves to collect this stuff,” said Sparky, picking up a small Statue of Liberty. “I brought this one to him when I went to visit my sister a few years back. He can’t see any of these places, and postcards don’t do him any good, so he always asks for something he can touch—some miniature version representing the places most of us can just go see. I guess he sees these places by touching them.”

  “Sure looks like a lot of crap to me,” said the sheriff, giving the bobble-headed hula girl a tap to set her swaying on an imaginary beach of Hawaii.

  “Yeah, I suppose it is crap to us, but he’s go
t the whole world in here,” said Sparky. “I figure it’s the only way he’ll ever get any idea about these places. When he heard I was going to New York, he told me to ‘bring back the Statue of Liberty’ to him. I told him it wouldn’t fit in my suitcase, and he thought that was pretty funny.”

  Sparky rubbed his fingers along the statue as he continued, “When I gave him this statue, he pored his hands all over it as he made me describe to him how big the real one is. You should have seen his hands working this statue—feeling every crease in her gown, the seven little points on her crown, and all the way up to her torch—like he was taking a small tour of it himself.”

  “I still say it’s a bunch of crap,” said the sheriff.

  “Whatever,” replied Sparky, carefully placing the miniature back where he’d found it. “If it makes him happy—who are we to judge a blind man?”

  From the living room, the two men moved on toward the kitchen. The sheriff found a light switch right by the door and flipped it on. A bright ceiling light lit up the intense yellow walls of the kitchen.

  “Now that’s what I call yellow,” said the sheriff. “I wonder why a blind guy would want such a bright color for himself?”

  “I wondered that myself at first,” said Sparky, “but it’s not for him. He had me paint it for him and told me he wanted something bright and cheery, so that people who come to visit would feel happy in his house and would stay longer and visit him more often. I know most of us usually go sit with him at his table down at Masterson’s, but when it’s rainy or stormy, this yellow kitchen has lots of visitors.”

  The tiny kitchen was much less cluttered than the front room, as it only had a few knickknacks scattered about: a ceramic Matterhorn on the window ledge, a brass Big Ben atop the refrigerator, and a Golden Gate Bridge by the sink—otherwise, the kitchen looked very neat and tidy. Sparky walked over to a slightly ajar cupboard door; he carefully opened it all the way. The cupboard was sparse, but left inside was a nearly empty box of crackers, an almost used up jar of peanut butter, and a potato chip bag containing only crumbs.

  “Looks like Old Blind Carl needs to stock up on his snacks,” said Sparky.

  The sheriff moved over to the back door leading out to the backyard. He reached up and checked the deadbolt on the door—it was locked. “Looks like no one’s come in or gone out this door.”

  The sheriff pushed aside the brightly colored floral-patterned drape that was covering the window in the door and peered outside into the blackness. “Just to be sure though, after we search the rest of the house, let’s check out the backyard.”

  From the kitchen, they moved back through the living room, down a small hallway leading to a bathroom. The bathroom was also neat, clean, and tidy, with a miniature Sydney Opera House sitting on the back of the toilet.

  Only out of curiosity, the sheriff opened up the medicine cabinet above the sink. It was also rather sparsely filled. He closed the cabinet and then opened up the cupboard under the sink and shined his flashlight inside.

  “You know something I’ve always wondered?” began the sheriff. “How do blind men manage to shave by themselves?” He closed the cupboard and looked at Sparky. “And from what I can see here, Old Blind Carl doesn’t, because I don’t see any sort of razors or shaving cream or anything.”

  Sparky paused for a moment and said, “Maybe he’s the type of person, I mean, you know, race, that doesn’t need to shave.”

  The sheriff shook his head. “Maybe, but I don’t think so,” said the sheriff. “I think you’re talking about Indians—Native Americans. I don’t think he’s got that in him. Carl’s always just looked pretty much African American to me, but I could be wrong.”

  From the bathroom, the sheriff led the way to the last room in the small house, which was the bedroom. He located a string hanging down from a ceiling light in the middle of the room, near the bed. He pulled it, and both men were surprised. The sometimes cluttered but general neatness they’d observed throughout the rest of the house was absent from this room.

  The closet door and dresser drawers were open, and clothes were strewn about on the floor and on the bed. The bed was made and showed no signs of being slept in, but it was covered by clothes from the closet and dresser. Also on the bed was a small metal security box with its lid open. The sheriff peered inside the box. It was empty.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” the sheriff said, still looking at the box. “My guess is that this is where Old Blind Carl stored his money…and from the looks of this room, someone was looking for something and appears to have been in a bit of a hurry to find it. Maybe they found what they were looking for, in this box.” He looked around the room as Sparky followed his gaze.

  “A robbery?” asked Sparky.

  “It sure looks that way,” said the sheriff. “Old Carl may like his knickknack crap, but in general, as far as I can tell, he’s not a slob. In looking at this room, whoever made this mess wasn’t too concerned with neatness. Tomorrow, I want you to come back and run some prints on the house—and especially this box.”

  “Okay,” said Sparky, “but supposing he was robbed. We still don’t know where he is. And how did his cane get down by the river?”

  “Maybe someone disposed of him down there and then came back here to rob his house. Maybe that someone then boldly walked into Ernie’s Diner carrying the cane of the man he killed, with his pockets full of money stolen right from this house. We know one thing for certain—something unusual occurred in this room that was out of character for the way Old Blind Carl normally keeps things.”

  Sparky looked at the box and then back to the sheriff. “It does all start to make sense. If we can just find one good fingerprint in this room, maybe even on that box, we’ve got a pretty good case, I’d say.”

  The two men went on to search the backyard and around the perimeter of the outside of the house, looking for any other clues. They found nothing unusual or of interest.

  It was late and had been a very long day.

  “Tell you what,” said the sheriff, after closing the front wooden door but making sure it wasn’t locked, “why don’t we call it a day, and we’ll pick up with this tomorrow. We have some good clues to follow up on now. Tomorrow you’ll come back here, dust for prints, and then we’ll search around town, especially down by McCann Park and the river, for Carl. Also, even though you lost him tonight, we know Matthew Duncan must still be in town, so we’ll need to relocate him and talk to him. If you find his prints here at the house, we’ll arrest him on the spot. He seems to be the last person to have seen Old Blind Carl. Walking around with a missing blind man’s cane was pretty stupid.”

  “One thing I was thinking,” said Sparky, “is that we can’t be sure Matthew Duncan is still in town. When you called me on the radio earlier and found Ned’s car missing, I’d already lost sight of him down at Ernie’s. He could be the one who stole the car—he could be hundreds of miles from here by now.”

  “I suppose that’s possible, but my cop sense tells me he’s still in Cottonwood. I can almost feel him here, and there aren’t many places for him to hide. We’ll find him—trust me. Why don’t we plan on meeting at the office right after seven.”

  “Whatever you say,” said Sparky as each man turned toward home in the opposite direction along the sidewalk in front of Old Blind Carl’s house.

  “Oh, just one more thing,” said the sheriff, turning around and causing Sparky to stop and turn as well. “At some point tomorrow, we’ll need to go by the Reese’s to pick up Carl’s cane. It’s really a centerpiece in all of this and could well be the key to telling us the whole story of what’s happened to him.”

  “Right, I figured that,” said Sparky. “When I let Chelsea take it, I told her to expect that we might need it back. I’ll pick it up in the morning. Well, goodnight, John.”

  Sparky turned and continued on his way.

  “Goodnight, Spark,” said the sheriff as he turned and continued toward home.

&nb
sp; The night was calm and quiet as the sheriff walked along. It had been an eventful and tiring day—a day in Cottonwood unlike any other he could recall. He knew his town was experiencing disruptions, and something was stirring. Too many things were happening all at once for him to feel the kind of control he enjoyed. In a single day, the town had experienced a car theft, an apparent robbery, a missing person, a naked bather, and the stoppage of all traffic. It made him uneasy—he was losing control of the town he felt responsible for.

  The peacefulness of the night provided contrast to the growing unease inside of John O’Neil. As the stars silently spun and occasionally winked in their knowing way above him, the sheriff felt only a growing certainty that somehow involved in all of the strange events of the day was one person—Matthew Duncan.

  At that moment, if the sheriff had been able to sprout wings and be transformed into a bird ascending skyward into the deliciously quiet and refreshing air of the night, like some wise old night owl with keen vision and large eyes to cut through the darkness, he would have seen a most amazing sight. For from that height, he would have seen—walking parallel to the street where he was walking and traveling at nearly the same speed and in the same direction, only several blocks over—the very man he was thinking about. For at that moment, Matthew Duncan was walking hand in hand with his new wife, toward the home where she had formerly lived alone. And though the two men were now walking parallel paths with each other through the darkness of Cottonwood, very soon those paths would cross. Though each man sensed or even knew this crossing was inevitable—only one of them knew why.

  Thirty-Two

  The Scent of Jasmine

  Rebecca’s home was small but colorfully and warmly decorated. Her taste was elegant and simple in colors of deep earthen hues. Though she could not afford the greatest of luxuries in decorating, she had made the absolute most with what she had. Everywhere and in everything in her home, there were signs of life and vitality. Flowers, nature, and photographs of friends and family were the rule.