The Opium Equation

by Lisa Wysocky

  “I’ll bet those were great stories.”

  “He was mad, you know. At the end he went mad. Crazy mad. There was great tragedy in his life. Especially in his later years. He disowned his family. He became a hermit, holed up there in that old house. He became no more than an animal.” She turned to look at the portrait, her eyes gleaming, the creases of her mouth moving wildly.

  “He was an intelligent man, but there were some things he wasn’t very smart about. Oh, no. Not smart at all.”

  Adam got up from the bed and paced in the small open space of floor that was behind his grandmother. He made a frantic wind-it-up motion with his hand. I supposed it wouldn’t do to get Opal too worked up.

  She started in again, though, before I could make any noises about leaving. “I was just twenty when I married Alexander Dupree. I loved him. Oh, yes, I loved him. But he, too, had his secrets. In a lot of ways he was no better than Col. Sam. Then he died. Took sick one winter. Today they call it pneumonia. He was burning up. It was a terrible time. Left me with two little girls. No more than babies, they were.”

  “How did you manage?” I asked.

  She looked at me, her expression sly.

  “Oh, this and that. You know how it is.”

  She’s hiding something, I thought. She was daring me to challenge her, but I decided against it. What did it matter if the old woman rambled? She was entitled to her secrets. Goodness knows if anyone can get within spitting distance of ninety without a few secrets.

  “He never, ever stopped pining for the war,” she said, almost shouting. I wasn’t sure if she was talking about Col. Sam, her husband, or someone we hadn’t even discussed yet. “He needed humoring. Humoring in his old age, but he ended up turning everyone away. Everyone.”

  Throughout most of the conversation Opal had held her tonic glass to her chest. Now she put it back on the tray. Her eyes slowly moved across the room, settling on everything and on nothing.

  “Life is so sad, isn’t it, Cat?” she said. “There’s no one left who remembers the old days. Glenda gave me the painting of Col. Sam. It was in the house when she bought it. I like it not because of him, but because of what’s behind him.”

  I looked closely at the portrait and sure enough, behind old Sam was an open door and through the door was a glimpse of a beautiful garden. The garden looked old-fashioned and peaceful, a place where there would be no worries, no unhappy endings. I wondered what the real story of Col. Sam might be, and if there was anyone left who knew the truth.

  Opal then looked at me with a trace of her old defiance, her eyes once more as clear and as blue as her grandson’s.

  “There are those who know, those who want us to forget what happened back then. Because the past repeats itself. If we’re not careful,” she repeated, “the past will happen all over again.”

  There was a surprising amount of strength in her voice, but the morning had more than begun to place its mark on Opal Dupree. With each passing word, she spoke more slowly, the slurring more pronounced. Adam quit his pacing and came to rest behind his grandmother’s chair, and patted her shoulder. She shrugged him away.

  “Both of you listen up. I don’t care what happened to old Sam, and you shouldn’t either… .”

  Opal seemed to lose her train of thought because she stared blankly at the window for a time before continuing. “But mark my words, children, the past is coming back to haunt us and it’s closer than we think.”

  Her crippled hands fumbled fruitlessly for her cigarettes. Giving up, she turned again to the window, beyond which the sun was continuing to make a miraculous appearance. Then she slowly relaxed, weariness overcoming her body. Her final words were so slurred as to be almost unintelligible.

  “Don’t mistake me. I grieve for my daughter. Oh, how I grieve. But I can’t help the dead. It’s the living I want to save.”

  Her head jerked sharply, but she was fading fast. Adam stepped forward and bent to check on her. It was painful to watch.

  Opal started to chuckle. “It’s all down in the gopher hole. Adam knows all about it, don’t you, dear?” She didn’t wait for him to reply. “I know that you know. Oh, yes I do. But don’t worry. I won’t tell. Never, never, never. Mother said I must never, never, ever tell. And I won’t. Oh, no. Bad things will happen. Mother said… .”

  Beside the chair, Adam raised his eyebrows and sadly shook his head.

  “Go away, both of you,” she said. “What do you want with an old woman anyway? Leave me to my privacy.”

  Opal had, thankfully, put an end to the uncomfortable visit. I rose to go, but Opal suddenly reached out and clutched at my jacket.

  “Water and darkness,” she yelled, jerking my garment with surprising strength. “That’s what you need to look for, water and darkness.” Her head lolled sideways and she released her iron grip.

  “I think we should go,” said Adam, stepping in to escort me around his grandmother. “You can see how she is. She’s been failing the past few weeks, but since Aunt Glenda … well, it’s been difficult.”

  He held out his hands in a gesture of helplessness and before I knew it I had taken them in mine.

  “If we are lucky enough to live that long, it could happen to any of us,” I said.

  In her chair, Opal snored, then jerked awake and began to shout obscenities at us. Adam ushered me toward the door as a nurse came rushing in. As we left, the nurse was trying unsuccessfully to quiet Opal’s cackling.

  “I’m sorry if my grandmother upset you,” Adam said. “Unfortunately, she lives in a dream world most of the time now. You saw how she is. I thought, hoped, she might be better this morning. Mornings are usually good for her, but since she heard of Aunt Glenda’s death, she’s been pretty unstable. As you might guess, grief affects everyone differently.”

  We walked hand in hand to our cars. When we reached ny truck he turned toward me and I was surprised to find tears in his eyes.

  “Thank you for coming,” he said. “You’re the only one who has. Out of all the people she knows in this county, no one else has come by to see her. Even though she was difficult in there, I know it meant a lot to her for you to have come. It means a lot to me, too.”

  When we hugged I was amazed to feel the sharp thinness of his body and thought that Glenda’s death must have affected him a lot more than he let on.

  “Listen,” said Adam. “I know it’s almost time for lunch and you probably have things to do, but I haven’t had breakfast yet. Would you care to join me?”

  Cat’s Horse Tip #7

  “The wall of the horse’s hoof is thickest at the toe.”

  15

  WE HOPPED IN ADAM’S JAG AND SPED up River Road, crossed the river and dropped into Ashland City. There weren’t all that many places to eat in our illustrious county seat, but we drove past them all just for the heck of it. Finally, Adam settled on a riverfront restaurant back on the south side of the Cumberland. The new bridge was getting a lot of use today. The restaurant had just opened for lunch, but Adam charmed them into whipping up several stacks of pancakes for us.

  Even though I was still somewhat uncomfortable around Adam, it wasn’t every day a girl got to eat brunch with a real live soap opera star. I wished I had taken time this morning to tamp down my unruly hair and add a bit of lip gloss, but Adam didn’t seem to notice that I was not made up like a Hollywood starlet. If he did, he was a better actor than I had given him credit for.

  After settling in at a quiet table next on the river side of the restaurant we started talking about Glenda, but as often happens with people who do not know each other well, we ended up discussing ourselves.

  “Of all the professions in the world, how did you get to be a horse trainer?” he asked.

  Well this was disappointing. People usually ask that, sooner or later, but I had expected something more original from Adam. Its not as if training horses was the most unusual profession in the world. Not as unusual as, say, writing songs. But people think of training hor
ses as exotic and glamorous, when in reality it is simple dedication and hard work. Plus, I liked what horses taught me about myself. Horses mirror your every thought and emotion back to you.

  “I was your typical horse crazy kid who kept on pursuing her dreams when she grew up,” I said. It was my standard answer. I didn’t go into the “I’ll die if I don’t get to ride every day” mindset that had dominated my teens, and still did. Instead, I added, “It was interesting to me when Opal said her mother died when she was ten. My mother had breast cancer and died when I was eight, so unfortunately I know what it’s like to grow up without a mom.”

  “We sure are a bunch of motherless people. My mom died when I was nine,” said Adam. “Car wreck. I survived, she didn’t. I turned to music, but Aunt Glenda convinced me that acting held better prospects. I tried it for almost fifteen years, but as you probably know,” he said with a wry smile, “I wasn’t very good at it.”

  Now that he mentioned it, I remember Glenda saying how disappointed she was that Adam had not inherited the family knack for acting. Or maybe, I mused, he had.

  “After my mother died, Aunt Glenda raised me,” Adam continued. “So when I finally got smart enough to leave acting to the actors I came here, to Aunt Glenda. As you know, I’ve been staying with her while I’ve been getting back into my music, but the songwriting is coming along real slow. Nashville is a tough town for those of us who are trying to break into the music business.”

  Now the details were clicking into place. The Times had featured Adam when he moved here last summer. I remember the article had included a section on Glenda’s younger sister, Adam’s mother, Amie. I had forgotten that Adam had been in the car with her when it crashed. How horrible that must have been. I know how awful it had been for me to lose my mom at such a young age, but to be with Amie when she died in such an abrupt and tragic way would have been terrible for young Adam.

  The article also included some juicy gossip about how Amie had never married, and it was rumored that Adam’s father was Jacob Katz, who was at the time the very married head of the top motion picture studio in Hollywood. According to the article, Amie Dupree had followed Glenda to Hollywood and had been enjoying some success on her own, in addition to being well-known as a party girl. I did some quick mental arithmetic and figured Adam must be thirty-five or thirty-six.

  “Enough with my life, or lack of it,” he said as he signaled the waitress to bring more coffee. “Now it’s your turn.”

  I told him how my mom and dad met near the 101st Air Force Base in Clarksville. “They were introduced by mutual friends at a dance,” I said. “After my dad left the service, they moved to his home in Chicago, and I was born just after they moved. Even as a kid I could tell my mom and dad loved each other above everything else, and I always thought that was so cool. It really gave me a solid foundation. When Mom died, Dad was devastated. Let’s just say that he had a hard time coping. He spent more and more time at the corner bar and less and less time with me. When human services found me, I’d been completely on my own for more than a month.”

  I didn’t look at Adam as I was telling him all this; it wasn’t a story I told many people as I was never comfortable with the telling.

  “Somehow, my maternal grandmother learned I was going to be put in foster care, and she came to get me. She lived in a tiny town between here and Memphis, and I couldn’t have had a better place to grow up. Everyone knew everyone and no one locked their doors. My grandma was this great Southern lady. She was everything to me, but just after I graduated from college, she had a massive heart attack and died.

  “Grandma left me everything she had. I sold her house, bought the farm and, well, here I am.”

  “What about your dad?” Adam asked. “Do you ever see him, or did he drop off the face of the earth?”

  I smiled and shook my head, just as I always did when I thought of my father. “He pops in every now and then,” I said. I had learned over the years to be cautious about my dad, even when speaking of him. In a way, he’s like the proverbial bad penny that shows up unexpectedly every now and then; but there is also a vulnerability that endears him to me. He’s one of those people that you can’t not like. “There’s not been much structure in my dad’s life since Mom died,” I added. “He floats from place to place doing odd jobs, or he has lengthy visits with old friends.”

  “Well, you certainly are a credit to your family, such as it is. You are doing very well, I hear,” Adam said, leaning intently across the wide table. “Tell me about it. Tell me what true success feels like so I have something to look forward to.” The gleam I noticed when he welcomed me into his office the other day was back in his eyes, intensifying the sky-blue of his irises to aqua.

  “It isn’t winning the national and world championships as much as the work leading up to it,” I replied after thinking about it. “I remember the little things, like how our halter mare, Sally Blue, is allergic to any kind of fly treatment, even the new organic kinds. We had to douse her the entire season in vinegar and water to keep the bugs away. When she won her halter class at the world show we all doused ourselves with Sally’s vinegar. We all smelled so bad! That’s the kind of thing I remember more than the nervousness of waiting for the results to be announced, or the cheers of the crowd, or all the hard work.

  “And then there’s the people. I love my clients. Well, most of them.” I added. “Doc Williams fixed a broken arm for me in college and ended up being my first client when I set up shop. He is such a dear. And then there is Agnes Temple. She is the most annoying woman in the universe but she has such good in her heart that you can’t help but love her. She is like a little kid in many ways and gets so excited about the shows and the classes. She’s past seventy, but she makes it so much fun for all of us. I can’t imagine doing this without her. Or Darcy, my youth competitor. In a lot of ways she’s like a little sister.

  “And I can’t forget the horses. It is such an honor for me to work with such wise animals. Every time I walk into the barn I learn something new about them, and about myself.”

  “So,” I said, steering the conversation back to him. “When you finally get a song cut, you won’t remember the overall success of the song as much as how the song came to you, where you were, what color the sky was, and how much you love the people you were with that day. To me, those are the true measures of success.”

  Adam stared at me with a bemused expression. Hot damn, he was a handsome one. We locked eyes and it was several seconds before I could turn away.

  “Oh, gee,” I mumbled, “look at the time.” It was an easy out from a moment that could have led to so much more. A shrink once told me that my mother’s death caused some “abandonment issues” and that’s why I couldn’t stay in a relationship for more than three seconds. But I truly was shocked at how much time had passed. We’d been sitting there for much more than an hour.

  Murdered neighbor and missing kid aside, I had work to do. Horses to ride. We hopped back in the Jag and Adam whizzed me the few miles back to my truck. As he drove away I was surprised to find a smile on my face and thought I might have to revise my opinion of Adam Dupree as a shallow party boy. I’d just had a perfectly nice time with a perfectly charming man.

  I returned home to find Jon erecting a jump across the front of the driveway, not too far from the road. He had pulled two standards and three ten-foot ground poles from the outdoor arena and was creating a barrier to the television trucks who were parked along the side of River Road near Fairbanks.

  “Damned guy from the FOX network showed up in the barn aisle with a camera,” he offered in explanation. “He turned the thing on, lights and all, and Gigi about jumped through the roof. I told him if he didn’t leave the property immediately that Mason Whitcomb would sue his ass to kingdom come.”

  Good to know that Darcy’s dad’s name carried that much weight, I thought. Now if he would actually spend a little time with his daughter. I offered to help, but Jon tilted his head toward
the house and I saw two police cars parked near my door.

  Jon let me through the barrier and I found Deputy Giles on my porch with a search warrant. He had the grace not to meet my eyes when he handed it to me. I stood in the doorway, stunned, while he and a slimmer counterpart rummaged through my home. When they left with several items in opaque evidence bags, I didn’t even have the energy to ask what they had found.

  Cat’s Horse Tip #8

  “Remember to reward your horse’s thought or intention.”

  16

  IN THE QUIET OF MY KITCHEN, I made a comforting concoction of hot chocolate using soy milk, dark chocolate, vanilla, whipped cream, and lots of chocolate sprinkles. I thought about adding some coffee-flavored brandy but decided it was too early in the day. Besides, I had horses waiting.

  I poured the mixture into a double-sized mug, and Hank wagged his tail hopefully as I took the steaming cup into my living room. His wags lessened considerably, however, as I explained to him that chocolate is not good for dogs. Besides, I realized Hank was still not 100 percent back in my good graces. I don’t care what they say. Chewed sofa padding does not come out of Berber carpeting. Clearing the foam-flecked swivel rocker of yesterday’s mail, I settled in to think.

  I began the day believing Carole was right, that Bubba had seen or heard something that frightened him and he was hiding. But now I felt differently. I was starting to believe that whoever killed Glenda had also done something with Bubba. Whether the killer had hurt Bubba or just taken him somewhere was anybody’s guess.