Cari knew there’d be a murder even before she saw him walk into that May afternoon backyard party in his honor. Soft blue sky. Purple lilacs. Freshly mown grass. Him gliding through the American heartland crowd. A polite nod here, a handshake there, a shy smile as they led him toward the microphone.
She didn’t stand with teary-eyed parents from the elementary school, nor with still-married couples from the halls of her high school, nor with their small hometown’s Big Men and Boss Wives where they said she now belonged.
Cari stood alone at the back edge of everything.
Saw him.
Finally, oh finally, saw him.
OK, yeah, he was lean and keen-eyed, a mouth that made her loins ache like never before and for sure never after her wedding. And oh yes, she knew he was a librarian who fostered the wonders of what if and what is. But what pulled her out of only one possibility of murder went beyond him to the sum of them.
“Hey, everybody!” said Mayor Mel into the microphone. “Great to be here to thank Jeff Gage. What a guy! Only come to town five weeks ago, sees a school bus full of second graders drop its driveshaft, crash into a bridge. Climbs onto the bus tottering over a fifty-two-foot drop. Pulls the kids out. Gets everybody safe, and when he jumps clear, whoa: that school bus tumbles down into the river!”
Some man shouted: “Woo-hoo!”
“We already gave Jeff a plaque down at City Hall. The photographer drove eighty-seven miles from the Herald Tribune to take a picture for those of you who still read newspapers. But now here with just us folks, let’s let Jeff say what he wants to.”
Cheers. Applause.
Jeff stood in front of the microphone.
His blue eyes locked on her.
Cari knew he felt it, too.
Jeff said, “I did what I had to do.”
Stepped back from the microphone: what more was there to say?
Applause, cheers, calls for beers. People shake Jeff’s hand. Pat him on the back. He slides through groups of friends and neighbors and in front of the whole universe, steps up to Cari.
She held out her hand. He clasped it with the strength of softness.
They whispered their names. Held each other’s flesh until remembrance of their where and when made them let go, a release to propriety that triggered the townspeople to turn away from what they might see to what they should see.
“I don’t know what to say,” whispered Cari.
Only she heard Jeff reply, “This is crazy.”
“Crazy like jumping on a wrecked school bus that’s going to fall off a bridge?” Cari shook her head. “My whole life I’ve done what’s sane and it’s trapped me here, but now there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”
Cari said, “No bullshit. No polites. Please, please: talk to me true.”
Jeff stared at this woman with hair like the summer sun, who held him in her river eyes. “How much trouble am I in?”
“You’re not alone.”
“Rings on your fingers.”
“I’m sorry!” Tears glazed her vision. “I had to. And now I’m even sorrier, because maybe I pulled you into your own murder.”
Jeff said, “I didn’t die when our lightning bolt hit me, I came alive.”
“No, I’m talking for real, I—” Cari trembled. “Can we just have now? Just for a little while? Not talk about…murder?”
Trust filled his face as he nodded yes.
“Is it true you never married? All these years?”
“They were years without you. Drifted around. Drifted in and out of being not alone. But I was always lonely. And sure wasn’t because I’m gay, like an element in this town is afraid of. Hell, them being wrong is maybe why they’re leaving us alone so we talk. A bookish gay guy and a married woman, no threat to civic order.”
“We’re a threat to all the orders.”
“All I want is for you to be free.”
“All?” she whispered.
“I want you to be able to start there.”
Microphone voice, Mayor Mel: “Hey everybody, something’s happening!”
The microphone stood in front of Mayor Mel and an orange-haired man.
“Baden’s got something great to tell us!” said Mayor Mel as he turned the microphone over to the beefy, handsome, orange-haired man.
Whose voice boomed, “Me being inspired by Jeff over there…”
Cari and Jeff felt a hundred million burning eyes.
“As president and owner of the First National Bank and Trust, I’m donating $10,000 for the schools to repair and upgrade the buses for our kids!”
Mayor Mel led cheers.
Cari said, “That’s my husband. Grabbing the applause.”
Jeff gave a wry smile. “He owns the buses the county rents. Is supposed to keep them repaired so crankshafts don’t break and crash a busload of kids into a bridge. And oh will he collect on the insurance!”
“I wonder if the ten K will be his money or the bank’s,” she said. “I wonder where it will really go. No matter what, he’ll claim a tax deduction. And you better believe that ten thousand dollar kisses sweetheart deals made by his golf buddies.”
“Main Street, U.S.A.,” said Jeff. “We get the bad with the good.”
“You have no idea,” said Cari.
His nod led her eyes through the crowd to near the microphone, where husband/bank president Baden stood in a cluster of well-dressed males, big wheels who posed shoulder to shoulder and blocked a gaunt man from intruding on this wonderful moment of charity.
Jeff said, “See that shrunken guy in the flag patches windbreaker trying to talk to your husband? He keeps glancing over here. At you.”
“That’s Dave Maynard. Owns the dry cleaners and laundromat.”
Cari swept her eyes over faces she knew and mostly liked, even if they often turned away from her out of what might be pity.
“I should have gotten out when I was young,” she said.
“And gone where?”
“Wherever it’s us on the road, not the road on us.”
“Please don’t ever stop talking to me,” he said.
Mary Cutler, who worked as county clerk and recorder and ran a feed-our-local-hungry volunteer program, sent Cari a smile.
“I wasn’t always like this,” said Cari.
A woman slid from the crowd, slick ebony hair and crimson lips, diamond-studded velvet shoes crushing the grass under their soles.
“Cari,” purred the blood-mouthed woman, “there you are.”
Cari’s eyes never left the creature in front of her as she told Jeff, “Regina Swanson is our host. I’m sorry, Regina, do they still call you ‘Mrs.’ if you’re a widow?”
“Well, you’ll never have to worry about that, will you Cari? Now please take good care of Jeff here, this is his day to be important.”
Cari blinked. “His day? His one day to be important?”
“Why else would we be here?” said Regina. “And you must be bursting with pride for your husband! Baden’s ever so wonderful.”
Regina sashayed away hissing orders to the wait staff of scared high school girls in white blouses, black pants, and dollars’ need.
“Wow,” said Jeff.
Cari said, “Even if she hadn’t hit town last year with Neil Swanson when he came back from Las Vegas before his heart attack—maybe from being forty years older than his new wife—even if Regina wasn’t around, I’d still be murdered.”
“Do you want to tell me now?”
“What I want has never much mattered.”
“Does now.”
“What I want… This isn’t the me I wanted to be.”
Cari said, “I was a lifeguard.
“At the city pool. I was seventeen. Wore a red swimming suit with a white circle insignia on the front, a red cross inside it right between my breasts.
“All that meant something. I had a reason to go to work besides money. Days perfumed with chlorine and coconut oil. Blue sky and burning sun. Light shimmers in a turquoise pool. Walking barefoot on warm cement.
“Yeah, whistleblowing at wild kids splashing cannonballs. Eyeballing some toddler ambling off while mom talks to the woman on the next lounge chair. Wrestling floating dividers into lap lanes. A dozen boring gotta-do’s every day.
“But I belonged there. High on a white wooden chair so I could see what was going on. Decide what to do. Mirror sunglasses. And yeah, I knew guys licked me with their eyes. They always had. Boys my age, and now them plus grown-up married guys and even grampa guys, but so what, I wasn’t there for them. I was there getting to put all of me on the line to save lives.”
Cari shook her head.
“I never had to. Until…
“My Mom. Youngest woman in town to ever have a stroke—strokes. My run-off father used to hit her. She fought for me. All the way to my senior year summer. Then the strokes. Us alone, mountains of medical bills, food, rent, her needing somebody there all the time, us headed for the streets, no other options.
“Except Baden. I’d told every other guy no, but I really told Baden no.
“And that made me more important for him to get. Eleven graduating classes older than me. Biding his inheritance time at the prince’s desk his bank-founder father gave him. Needing a queen or at least a trophy so he could be king. Baden never gets told no. ‘One way or another’ is his rule. Has to keep showing people he wins. Can’t let anybody see that he ever lost.
“But I used our rent for that month, hired a smart lawyer who Baden and his attorney figured was ‘just a woman’. Pre-nup. ‘Saved myself’ until after Baden set Mom up in the nursing home because of the pre-nup. Saved myself until after the marriage certificate was signed and sealed. Cue the wedding bells and I’m still hoping. O’Hara Manor hotel, then…”
Cari’s eyes filled with a horizon that made Jeff flinch.
“After we found out I couldn’t work as a breeding bitch, he mostly stopped bothering.” She blinked. “Mostly.”
“Leave him,” said Jeff. “Right now. We’ll walk out of here right now.”
“Then Baden’d have to kill us both sooner rather than later.”
Gaunt Dave pushed his way up to them.
“Hey, Cari, seen your Mom up to the nursing home, doing good, gonna be around for a long time, but I gotta talk to you,” blurted this skeletal man who smelled of chemicals. “Talk to Baden, you gotta talk for me, ’cause all of ’sudden, ’can’t get to him.”
Cari said, “How are you, Dave?”
“How does it look? I’m fucking cancer dying. Hell, ’be better if I died before dawn. That ain’t crazy. Then there’d be something left for Sheila and the girls, but the insurance won’t let me push it, and Baden, your husband, he won’t let me set up so’s my family won’t lose everything.
“He says the bank’s gonna call my mortgage right now on the dry cleaners. Hell, I took it out with an escalating clause like he said back when so as to fold in all the fees the bank kept charging me. Now the monthly’s sky high and if the bank calls the mortgage before I die, instead of Sheila getting the mortgage pay-off insurance the bank made me buy, I leave nothing behind me but pain.
“Plus, Baden’s on the private prison’s board. The government don’t give a damn about those locked-up guys they zoo with that back-East corporation. Tax dollars pay whatever bills get sent by the prison. Politicians write laws to keep the cells full. Now Baden says the prison is going to start doing its laundry inside. Make the cons do it. Take in other contracts, too, like how I do for the nursing home, though where the hell the prison’s gonna get laundry machines cheap enough to make a go of it right away, damned if I know.”
Dave shrank into himself. “Or maybe damned ’cause I do know.
“What I know… Never said nothing ’bout folks who signed petitions to keep that soul-sucking prison away from our town then gettin’ after dark calls about how their home mortgages and car loans could be hurt if they didn’t change their politics, erase the choice they made. ’Never said nothing ’bout a lot like that.
“A lot.” Dave shook his head. “You know what’ll happen when the bank takes my dry cleaners? Guy I know shovels for the city crew let me know. Gonna pave it into a parking lot. ’Prison’s gonna rent it, make whoever’s got the cheap-money guard jobs park there, ride some rental bus the three miles to work behind them electric razor wire fences. Make any visitors to the locked-up guys park there. In Baden’s lot. Charge ’em all.”
Someone laughed on the far side of this backyard party.
“My dry cleaners ain’t just what keeps my family alive,” said Dave. “It’s my life. My work. How I got to be a free man and raise a family and not fuck anyone over or get fucked by just being alive. You gotta talk to Baden. Make him let me play it out, leave Sheila and the kids something to salvage. Please, Cari.”
Cari touched the man’s thin arm through the cloth of his windbreaker decorated with flags and politically conservative slogans. “I’ll do what I can.”
The dying man’s nod fought off tears as he melted away.
Alone with Jeff, she said, “One more hollow truth. Wish I could have lied.”
“We all get enough lies,” said Jeff.
“That prison,” said Cari. “I feel like I’m behind its razor wire. Did you know all the prisoners’ accounts have to run through Baden’s bank? That he handles all the banking for the prison, too?”
“We can get away,” said Jeff.
“The pre-nup,” said Cari. “Baden was so clever he trapped us both. He figured I’d ask for a divorce, so he put in a clause that gives most everything to ‘the aggrieved party’—meaning him, not thinking the split could set up the other way. He made adultery no penalty because he knew before the wedding he’d be fucking around. Divorce means he’ll stop paying for my Mom. Not even you and I together could cover that. He’ll toss her out on the street.
“Beyond money, he knows he’ll lose if we split—even if he hooks up with Regina, merging with her widow’s inheritance so he’s even more of a big shot. But if I walk free, then he’s stuck being a loser. Plus, he can’t risk me out from under his thumb with what I might know and what a public divorce might show.”
Jeff frowned. “So you think he’s going to kill you?”
“And now maybe you, too. Our us—which everybody at this party must see—that makes you a perfect fall guy for the murder. Or makes you somebody who’d come after him for killing me. Hell, he probably wants to kill you because, this afternoon, you got what he never did from someone who’s legally his.”
Jeff glowed.
Said, “Everything changes in a heartbeat.”
Shook his head. “But murder…”
“Reporter from the Herald Tribune drove up here in January, he—”
“I remember,” said Jeff. “He was out doing some story about oil field leases, the pumpers out on the prairie. Car broke down. No cell service. Froze to death.”
“He was working a story on bank deals and public lands and oil rights,” said Cari. “I’d never seen Baden scared before. Then…
“Then the night before they found the reporter frozen dead trying to walk out safe from his broken-down car, that night Baden stormed into the house, stinking of whiskey, grin on his face. Grabbed me, dragged me…
“When it was done, he… He stood beside the bed, said, ‘You best remember, sugar isn’t always so sweet.’
“The next morning when I heard about the reporter’s car breaking down on the empty prairie where he went to meet someone or maybe get a picture of something… Baden used to brag about how in high school, he’d pour sugar in the gas tanks of anybody who pissed him off.”
Sensed someone coming and turned from Cari in time to send a smile to Sid Stiffarm and shake that chiseled cheekbones man’s hand.
“Just gotta say, Jeff,” said Sid, “helluva thing you did. Thanks.”
“You’d have done the same,” said Jeff. “I know about you in the Corps.”
“Hi, Cari,” said Sid, and a light flashed in his eyes as he turned back to Jeff. “You know how smart this woman is?”
“I’m lucky to be finding that out.” Jeff watched her.
“Week or so back, she calls me down the shop, insists I come up to her place, that big house on the hill overlooking town. They keep all Baden’s cars in their garage, Cari’s car being that old—I know it’s what you brought owned to the wedding, so you don’t wanna give it up, nice old Ford from the last century!”
Sid laughed.
“Anyhow,” Sid told Jeff, “Cari here called me up ’cause when she went to get in her car to go see her mom at the nursing home, she spotted a trickle of wet run down the road out past her front bumper. Last few years, rainy season ain’t but half of what it was and it’d been weeks since, so instead of doing the regular thing of bringing the car into the shop—hell, most people wouldn’t even have noticed that trickle—’stead of driving off, she calls me. Insists I come up there.
“Cari, she makes up her mind, Katie bar the door! Cari’s been like that since she was a little girl. Lived across the alley from us, so I drive up to see what’s what. Come to find out, her old car’s worn a gash in the brake line and it’s trickled out plumb empty. She’d’ve just driven off like most folks, she’d’ve gone full tilt boogie down Knob Hill into who knows what. Maybe careen all the way down to the train tracks.
“Now I don’t call that lucky,” said Sid. “I call that smart, and she’s—”
“What is my wife, gentlemen?”
Baden lumbered into their trio, his orange hair laying strong and stiff in the breeze, his handsome florid face all smiles and his meaty paw clutching a clear goblet of white wine.
“Hey, how you doing?” said Sid. “Just thanking Jeff here—and hey, thanks to you, too. Helluva thing you did, donating. Good thing.”
Sid held a beg your pardon hand up toward Baden. “Can I get you to do another good thing?”
“You never know,” said Baden.
“That guy from across the mountains who you said works for you, ’come by my shop and like you asked, I cut him in ahead of the line ’cause he needed to go, paid me cash and come to find out, he paid sixy dollars too much. Can I get you to ask him to call the shop so I can figure out how to get his money back to him?”
“Can’t you just keep it?”
“Hell, it ain’t mine.”
Baden said, “I’ll let him know.”
“Much obliged,” said Sid. “And thanks again for everything.”
Baden kept his eyes on the service station/garage proprietor walking back into the party crowd, sent his gravel voice to Cari and Jeff.
“Our Indian brothers,” said Baden. “A good one is a good one.”
Jeff threw his words like stones: “People are people!”
Anyone could see Cari rise to her full height.
Neither of them flinched when Baden drilled his gaze into them.
“Look at you two. Standing here. Together.”
Jeff said, “Free country.”
“So they say.” Baden grinned. “But everywhere I look, there’s a price tag.”
Baden laughed, and Cari smiled. “Speaking of price tags, what ‘man from across the mountains’ works for you—or the bank? Doing what?”
“Don’t worry your blonde.” Baden leered at Jeff. “She’s an all-over natural.”
Cari felt Jeff go cold, burn hot.
Quickly said, “Since when do you drink white wine, Baden, or is that your new natural?”
“This,” said Baden swirling the golden fluid in his glass, “this is class. Right time. Right place. Right, dear?”
“What you got is a chance to do one thing right,” said Cari.
“And you get to choose? One thing?”
All the options in the universe froze Cari in that tick-tock.
She fought through a thousand thoughts, chose to say, “Dave Maynard. The dry cleaners. His dry cleaners. Leave him be.”
“Oh, I am. There’s nothing on earth gonna stop me from leaving him be just like he is and is gonna be after we finish the business the law lets me do.”
Baden grinned and raised his white wine in a toast. “And you can take that to the bank—my bank. You two got nothing to take nowhere else.”
As he walked away, his chuckle turned to a modest and benevolent smile for the crowd in this hometown backyard.
Jeff whispered to Cari, “What the hell are we going to do?”
Invisible in the crowd, a woman with an extra white wine in her laughed. Just let the hell go. Laughed at herself. Laughed at what was, what wasn’t. Laughed at the everything of this fine spring backyard afternoon.
Cari looked away from Jeff. Looked back.
Said, “Don’t say what I’m dying to hear and say or I won’t be able to do what I’ve gotta and then you’ll—we’ll both be trapped, just waiting for some man from across the mountains.
“Get out of here,” she told Jeff. “Right now. Don’t look back. Leave town tonight. Fuck your job at the library, go. Stay away. You know other folks here, you can check with them, they’ll tell you what happens.”
“I’m with you,” he said. “Together for whatever.”
“Even murder?” whispered Cari.
“He can try.”
“Not him,” she answered. “Me.”
She shook her head. “It’s gotta be me. I’ve got to be first. Murder him.”
Cari looked at this man who was all she dared not name.
Jeff didn’t look away. Didn’t flinch.
From across the backyard came a chorus of chuckles as the town’s big men ratified something Baden said. Regina’s fingers touched Baden’s forearm and quivered the white wine in the glass he held, a connection that lingered as their linked gaze said they knew the heart of the big joke.
“Wait,” said Jeff. “How did her husband die?”
“Naked and not alone.”
Regina turned from the pack of important men and their supportive wives, gestured with her wine goblet that matched Baden’s.
“Hello everyone!” Though no microphone amplified her voice, no ears in that backyard missed what she said. “Thank you so much for coming! And for letting me introduce you to this wonderful California white zinfandel. Oh, and a special thanks to our guest of honor, Jeff!”
Courteous applause rippled through the crowd in this hometown backyard as faces turned to smile at where Jeff stood. Cari saw Sid Stiffarm flash Jeff a proud thumbs-up. And maybe it was just her imagination, but she thought she saw Donna in the crowd hold her fist close to her own heavy breasts to send Cari a thumbs-up.
“Sadly,” continued Regina, “the board meeting for the civic development corporation was scheduled way before that school bus, and these things are always so difficult to change. Mayor Mel and the others and I, we have to follow those rules, but we also wanted to take the time to honor our local hero.”
Tired applause. Baden beamed.
“However, now I’m afraid this party must end so the real work can begin,” said Regina. “One of those boring dinner parties, but don’t worry, I’ll make it through—a-gain.”
No one laughed.
“So I have to ask all of you regular—”
She laughed like she’d goofed. “Could everyone who’s not working the board dinner please leave now? Sadly, that means even some of you wives.”
Jeff saw the ebony-haired widow’s eyes hit Cari.
The crew of big wheels backed Regina like a Vegas chorus line.
Mayor Mel nodded to his wife, who carried her practiced smile out of this backyard.
Neither reluctance nor rebellion stayed the crowd of citizens as they shuffled toward the narrow funnel of departure.
Sid Stiffarm cleared a path for Mrs. Jenkins working her two canes over the lawn. Jeff saw Mary discreetly dump a plate of plastic-wrapped, store-bought brownies into her purse for that night’s feed-the-hungry dinners. Busty Donna whispered something to high school teacher Britene as they eased toward the exit. Skeletal flag-jacketed Dave Maynard pushed his way through the flow of the crowd to where Jeff and Cari stood.
“Saw you,” Dave told Cari, his face determined, grim. “Saw you talking to him, and I gotta, you gotta—”
All the gotta’s of this world gripped Cari. She struggled to find the right words. Spoke them as flat and hard and true as bullets to the dying man’s heart.
“I’m sorry,” she told Dave. “You’re not crazy. You’re right. Baden’s going to take your dry cleaners. Take it before you die. No insurance for Sheila and your two girls. Nothing for you and them but eviction notices. I did all I could. I’ll do—you know this—when whatever happens happens, I’ll do all I can to save Sheila, the girls. But you know Baden down in his bones. I can’t do what I can’t do.”
Dave’s face screwed into a desperate pained plea.
Blink.
Dave blinked again.
Looked at Jeff. Nodded.
Looked at Cari, said, “You’re a good person. Thank you.”
The doomed man stepped back into the crowd.
“What are we going to do now?” said Jeff.
She gave him no answer as the crowd shuffled out of here.
No one beyond where Cari and Jeff stood saw what was happening until—
BAM! BAM! BAM!
Screams. Hometown shoes scrambled to escape.
Baden crashed to his knees, his face in shock, his chest a mush of red from bullet holes Dave blasted into him after stepping from the crowd at can’t miss close range. Dave let his pistol fall to the grass, his eyes full of the big man on his knees before him, the banker’s eyes fogging with what he couldn’t believe.
Regina bolted from the killing stage in her backyard, pushed a high school girl server out of the way and trampled a seven-year-old boy as she fled.
Sherriff Warren engulfed the shooter in a bear hug.
Hell, that lawman knew Dave. Poor guy didn’t deserve to be blasted down, which would have ended things a whole lot better for the town, because all Dave’s medical costs got transferred to the jail holding him for the murder trial that never had time to happen before he died a legally innocent man.
Screams softened to “Where are you?” “I’m OK!” shouts.
Cell phones whipped out of back pockets and purses as much to snap photos or film the scene as to message loved ones: Didn’t get me.
Nobody typed This time.
Neighbors reached out to help neighbors.
Eyes turned to Sherriff Warren’s capture of—Oh, my God it’s Dave!—in a bear hug.
Nurse Vicki knelt over Baden, who’d repeatedly unsuccessfully pressured her for sex. She fulfilled her medical oath to her best, but failed to staunch the blood spurting from his chest. Then that pulsing red flow… Stopped.
Jeff stood where he was.
Waited until Cari blinked. Saw him. Knew he wouldn’t run.
Before the roar of events swept her away until, he had to ask.
“Did you know Dave had a gun?”
The wealthy and powerful new widow said, “Isn’t this America?”