SERGEANT HURLEY AND I have a strange relationship. He’s the one who first took me into care after my mother went a whole week without getting off the couch. I was four, and someone spotted me trying to milk the cow and eating carrots straight out of the ground. Hurley was a rookie back then, and he helped my mother out with groceries and stuff. He said he was her friend. She didn’t even get off the couch when he took me away. Even thanked him. I remember looking out the window of the cruiser, eating the ice-cream cone he’d bought me and it dripping on the seat. I was scared he’d be mad, but he just ruffled my hair. Said it happened all the time.
A few years later he was posted away. The next time I saw him he was standing at the farmhouse door, hat in hand. Looking like a ghost. He tried to hug me, but I was seventeen by then. Foster homes had taught me a lot. All the bad memories came back, and I shoved him away. I barely saw the tears in his eyes or heard the words he said. I’m so sorry, son, there’s been a terrible accident.
He called me son that day. He said if I ever needed anything, he was just a phone call away.
There was a time when I wished he was my father. Thought maybe he was. I’m not much good at reading people. My mother and I lived alone. She was estranged from her family and had few if any real friends. So I didn’t know if they had anything going. As a kid, I thought he was just there. Once I had Jessica, I found myself wondering about the smiles they shared when they thought I wasn’t looking. But Sergeant Hurley has eyes like chestnuts and a body like a grizzly bear. He could have played linebacker for the CFL. Beside him, even Steve looks like a dwarf.
Hurley is back as detachment commander now, and he is getting gray and grumpy. He drives around town like he owns the place. He calls everyone by their first name, and he knows everyone’s business, including mine. And that is the problem. He checks up on me, watches me when he thinks I’m not looking.
I knew he’d be way too nosy if I asked him about the dead dude. I wanted to keep this story private. I wanted to control the tongue wagging and the knowing looks. I didn’t want to drag up old gossip my mother could never outrun. I didn’t want him peering over my shoulder each step of the way. So I didn’t take Jessica’s advice. Instead, I decided to try my chances with Aunt Penny again.
Aunt Penny’s shop was hopping. There was a lineup at the cash register, and every customer had a long story to tell. Aunt Penny looked like she’d been on her feet all morning. She leaned on the counter every chance she got. She hates any offer of help, saying she isn’t in her grave yet. But I restocked the heavy water jugs and a few other things while I waited.
I’d moved on to charcoal bags by the time the last customer left. Aunt Penny even thanked me as she sank into her chair. But the smile didn’t last.
“You’re a ray of sunshine today, Ricky. What’s on your mind?”
“My friend from Calgary—”
“Is he still here?”
“We’ve learned some things about his father. I want to ask—”
“I told you all I know.”
I pushed on. “We think he died in a snowmobile accident just north of town before I was born. Do you remember it?”
She took off one shoe and rubbed her foot, saying nothing.
“That would have been pretty big news back then.”
“I don’t make a habit of engaging in gossip.” She raised her head. “And neither should you. It’s in the past. Best left in the past. That poor man paid the price.”
“Then you knew him?”
“Ricky! Stop putting words in my mouth. I knew nothing about it.”
At that moment the bell over the door rang, and Nancy burst into the shop. Her eyes lit up at the sight of me.
“Rick!” she cried. “Gus and I remembered more about that man from Calgary!”
Aunt Penny was shaking her head, but Nancy didn’t seem to notice. “He was a friend of your mother’s brother,” she said. “They met out west, and he came to visit.”
Aunt Penny knocked a bottle of Coke off the counter with a bang. “Cedric!” she snapped as it rolled across the slanted floor toward me.
Nancy barely missed a beat as she scooped it up. “Gus remembered his name was Wes. Don’t know his last name, but Penny, you’d sure remember him. Him and Tommy tore up the town a few times.”
“Ancient gossip!” Aunt Penny snapped, going the color of a pomegranate. “I won’t be repeating any of it. What can I get you, Nancy?”
Nancy rolled her eyes at me. “Right. If we could look into your aunt Penny’s head, the secrets we’d find! But she has a point. The man’s dead now. No help to your friend to know his father was a wild one. I’m wondering if you have any of that peach pie…”
I hardly heard the conversation about peach pie. Steve’s mother had called his father Wild West. This time the words wild and Wes brought back a flash of memory. Something buried deep in the past. What was it? Something to do with friends. I remember thinking it was strange, because my mother didn’t have many friends.
I was heading back to my truck, lost in thought, when the memory fell into place. I’d been sorting through my mother’s papers after she died. I had to pay bills, find her bank account and the deed to the farm. My mother hadn’t paid a bill in months. She’d just thrown everything into a drawer in her bedroom, where it had gotten mixed up with my little-kid drawings and the poems she’d written. In the jumble I’d found a scrap of paper folded into a tiny square. When I’d unfolded it, I saw a stranger’s handwriting.
Wild Wes. With a phone number and area code I didn’t recognize.