The Best-Laid Plans

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During a break that morning, I stepped out and called Viv to tell her about Scott's phone call.

“I told him I would go see her tomorrow. You'll come with me, right?”

“Of course. And tomorrow is better for me, anyway. I couldn't go today. I'm grounded.”

“Grounded?”

“They're calling it observation,” she said with a sneer. “Because of the trauma I experienced yesterday.”

“Are you making air quotes right now?”

“Maybe.”

“Well,” I said. “You did get a very special hug from Imogene. That's got to have an effect on a person.”

“Don't make me gag!” Viv said. “That woman is being hailed a hero all over this blessed place. Can you believe that?”

“Well, yeah. That was the intention, wasn't it?”

“Shut up. You know what my intentions were. And they sure as heck weren't for Imogene Walker to suddenly find herself back in the flow of her purpose.”

Poor Viv. I could certainly understand the frustration of having one’s plans go completely off the rails.

“I'm making the best of it, though,” she said. “Miss Marple marathon on Amazon. If that is what Nigel's into, surely I can find a way to make it work.”

“You're still into him, even when he stood by like a scared little old woman while an actual old woman saved you?”

“I don't appreciate you talking about my boyfriend that way,” Viv said with a sniff. “He was only calling for help, as any sensible person would do. Imogene was the one who barged in and took over, like she always does. You're still going to yoga tonight, right?”

I had forgotten about yoga. I considered for a moment. The yoga studio was right beside Serena's little shop. I was still kind of mad at her for giving me a weird dream this morning.

“Actually, I'm going to skip, too. Everyone will just ask me about you the whole time. It'll get annoying.”

It was true that yoga would be less fun without Viv. But tonight, I had a different set of awkward positions I needed to tackle.

––––––––

I pulled out of Flo's parking lot that afternoon with a knot of anxiety in my stomach. Schemes kept going through my head—schemes of how to get Tony on my side.

Schemes were quickly replaced by guilt. I honestly did not want the kind of marriage where I schemed to get my husband to do stuff. Tony was always straight with me. I wanted to be straight with him. Whatever my role was, I didn't want it to be manipulator.

But...would it be so wrong to just...make sure he was in a good mood when I did talk to him?

I sighed and pulled into the grocery store parking lot.

“Windy, call Juanita.”

Juanita was one of Tony's many sisters, and she seemed pretty okay with me. I mean, basically everyone in his family took a better view of me since I helped prove Tony innocent of murder, but Juanita had liked me when we first got married and not many of the sisters had.

When she answered, I said, “Juanita, I want to cook something nice for Tony. What's his favorite dish?”

“Do you mean I wrecked the car nice, or I spent too much at the mall nice?”

I scoffed. “Neither.” Good grief. Was I fighting a losing battle with this manipulator thing? “I just...want to do something nice for him.”

“I forget you two are newlyweds, kind of.”

“I use the term somewhat. Does he have a particular favorite that's not too complicated and doesn't require a lot of ingredients?”

“You're in luck. Tony is notoriously easy to please when it comes to homemade cooking. Make him some tortillas, put some butter and honey on them, and he'll do anything you want him to.”

“I'm not trying to get him to do anything,” I protested.

“Well, I'd think of something if I were you. Because if you give him warm tortillas he's going to be ready to do something impressive. I'm just saying.”

I chewed on that one for a second, but couldn't think of anything appropriate to say. “I guess. Let's just see if I can pull it off, first.”

“No sweat. Tortillas are literally the easiest thing you can make. If you manage to mess them up, I'll be impressed.”

“Remember, you grew up with a family that cooks. It's in your genes. I grew up in a family where cooking meant reheating in the microwave.”

“I'll text you the recipe. Don't worry. Follow the directions and you'll be fine.”

My phone dinged with the text from Juanita as I was pulling the shopping basket out of the corral. She wasn't kidding—it was ridiculously simple. Corn flour and water. Don't be afraid to adjust the amounts to get the right consistency. Mix it up, roll it into balls, press it out in the tortilla press, grill it on a hot cast iron pan.

My anxiety lifted. This was something I could definitely handle.

I grabbed a bag of cornmeal, a jar of cooking oil, a package of wax paper, a pound of butter, and a jar of honey and headed home to pick up Stump.

Back at Tony's, I found the key he kept hidden and let myself in. While I unloaded the few items I'd bought onto the counter, Stump busied herself dragging the bed Tony had bought her from the living room to the kitchen. I rummaged in the cabinets and found the tortilla press, a bowl for mixing, and a cast iron pan. I stood back and surveyed everything. Surely it couldn't be this easy.

I measured everything out like Juanita had instructed. At first the mixture looked too lumpy. I divided it up and rolled it into balls, but they kept falling apart.

I dumped everything back into the bowl and added a little bit more water. I grabbed a handful and tried to roll it into a ball. It mushed and stuck to my hands.

“You will not panic,” I ordered myself, because I was starting to feel defeated already. “These are literally the easiest things you could make. You've made harder stuff before and it was fine.” That was true. Just the week before I had made a baked cod recipe from my Fat Fighters book that had looked beautiful on the plate. It hadn't tasted very good, but I think that was the cod's fault, not mine.

I elbowed on the water faucet and washed the gritty, sticky gunk off my hands, took a deep breath, and headed back into the fray.

I added more cornmeal. Too stiff. Then more water. Too mushy. Then more cornmeal. I decided that, even if the little balls fell apart, they would stick together once I smushed them in the tortilla press. That thing was solid cast iron and as heavy as an anvil. I thought—and then looked guiltily around in case there was a mind-reader in the room—that it would probably make a good murder weapon, should one need such a thing. I got the cast iron pan hot, added a little oil, and gently peeled the first tortilla off the wax paper. It ripped in two, but I put both halves in the pan anyway, feeling that if I didn't get something cooked, I was going to cry.

The two jagged halves sizzled away on the pan and I started to gain a glimmer of hope. They smelled okay. I bent over the stove and studied them carefully, watching for signs that it was time to turn them. Then the warm corn smell turned to a suspiciously burnt smell. I used the spatula to lift an edge of one, but it didn't look burnt. I sniffed again, lifting the other one. Both were just turning golden brown. But something definitely smelled burnt.

Too late, I realized that while I studied the tortillas, I had laid the crumpled wax paper too close to the burner. As I watched, the red ashy edge along one side flamed to life and the whole ball went up. I screamed and threw the burning wad into the sink, then stood for a moment too long, chest heaving in fear that I would hit the curtains and burn Tony's house down, even as I saw with my own eyes that it was in the sink. I leaped over, turned the water on full blast and the flames sputtered out. I was dismayed, though, at the scorch marks that now marred Tony's white sink.  Would that come out? I checked under the counter and found some powdered cleaner—a brand I hadn't seen before. Probably something from Tony's cleaning business—something only businesses had access to or something. I shoved the burned wax paper down the disposal and sprinkled the powder onto the burns.

I checked the clock. Still an hour before Tony would be home. I had time to erase the evidence of my clumsiness. I sniffed. The room still had a decidedly burnt smell, though.

I leaned over to open the kitchen window to let in some fresh air. The mid-November air rushed in with a gusty chill and the curtains blew into my face. I pushed them back, annoyed, but I thought I would only need to leave the window open a few minutes to air things out enough to be presentable again. If Tony noticed a smell, I could always pass it off as a burned tortilla. Those black marks, though—I had to get rid of them.

I found a scrub brush in a jar beside the sink and scrubbed the powder, encouraged that I could tell a difference almost immediately. Unfortunately, it smelled even more burnt, though. How porous were porcelain sinks? Could the smell be, like...baked into it?

I scrubbed some more and sniffed. Jeez-O-Peet . Had I done something to permanently stink up his sink? Would I end up having to replace the thing? How much did sinks cost?

I scrubbed some more, but it wasn't helping. In fact, it was making things worse—the air was acrid. I felt a moment of panic as I wondered if maybe this cleaner was something that reacted to the material of the sink in a harmful way. Tony had told me that you had to be careful with mixing cleaning chemicals. What if I had just created a toxic concoction and Tony would come home to find both me and Stump, dead on the kitchen floor?

But Tony was a very safety conscious guy, I reminded myself. If it wasn't supposed to be used on the sink, he wouldn't have had it under the sink.

The smell was getting worse, though—there was no denying it. I leaned forward and put my nose right to it. No, not bad. I straightened, then sniffed again. Yes. Bad. What the—

At that moment, several things happened in quick succession.

Tony pulled into the driveway.

Stump began to bark like crazy.

I turned to see what she was barking at, and instead saw a rather large conflagration in the cast iron pan on the stove.

I hadn't turned the “tortillas” off, and they were now in full blaze.

“Oh no!” I grabbed the handle of the pan with both hands and jerked it off the stove. I turned back to the sink.

The curtains blew in the wind. If I got near them with this pan, they would go up.

I spun around, looking frantically for something to do with this portable bonfire. The freezer? No. The fire climbed higher. Stump decided she would help by dancing around between my feet and barking furiously. Jeez-o-friggin'-Peet, it was one tiny ball of cornmeal, how could it be creating such a big fire?

Also, the pan was heavy. Heavier because I couldn't help but carry it at the very length of my arms. It's not as if I wanted to snuggle up to the thing. I was afraid if I took one hand off to open a door, I would drop it onto the floor and Stump.

So basically, here's what it was: me, spinning like a demented top in the middle of Tony's kitchen, holding a foot-high fire at arm's length, screaming “What? What? What?” because I was too freaked out to form coherent thoughts. All of this was accompanied by Stump's frantic agitation.

The front door opened.

Outside! I thought. I corrected course and set off for the entryway. I stumbled over Stump and almost dumped the entire thing in the middle of the dining room floor, but I managed to stay upright long enough to lunge, arms outstretched, into the entryway.

Tony, one foot in and one foot out of the front door, froze when he saw me, his eyes wide.

“Outside!” I shouted, because it was the only word my mind could form. I barreled toward him.

He leaped back outside, one hand on the screen door to keep it open, and I rushed past. I ran to the middle of the sidewalk, not sure what to do now. The wind was high. Would it carry a spark to the nearby trees, full of dead and dry fall leaves, and set Tony's entire neighborhood on fire?

I stood in the middle of the sidewalk and repeated my spinning performance from the kitchen.

“What is it?” Tony shouted.

“Fire!” I shouted back.

“I know! But...what was it?”

“Homemade tortillas!” I tried to say. But the word choked off with the tears suddenly clogging my throat.  If you manage to mess them up...

He must have understood well enough, though, because he turned, pulled a water hose from a nearby pot, and turned the water on. “Put it down, Salem. In the middle of the sidewalk. Just put it down.”

The fire that had raged just seconds before was now visibly smaller. As I bent to lower it to the sidewalk, a black crumb rolled over and the flame went out. A second later, water splashed into the pan with a loud, steamy hiss.

Tony turned the water off, silently wound the hose back into the pot, and turned to me.

I chewed my lip. Finally, I said, “Your sister is going to be so impressed with me.” 

Inside, Tony silently surveyed the kitchen. Now that the fire was gone, it didn't look too bad. I'd made a bit of a mess with the cornmeal and everything, but it wasn't the post-apocalyptic disaster it could have been.

“I wanted to surprise you by making one of your favorite things,” I said. “Juanita sent me her recipe for homemade tortillas and she said it was literally the easiest thing I could make.”

He nodded. Turned the bag of cornmeal and studied it, then the bottle of oil. Nodded again. Then, “She told you to get cornmeal?”

“Yeah, she said you preferred the corn kind to the white kind, so...” Something about that sounded funny, though. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and reread what Juanita had texted. I raised my head. “Corn flour. Which is the same thing as cornmeal, right?”

The corners of his mouth tipped up. “It's very, very close.”

My shoulders slumped. “Ugh. I didn't read it closely enough. No wonder they wouldn't behave.”

“It's okay. Salem, I'm a Hispanic man with five sisters. If I need tortillas, I can find tortillas. I promise.” He laughed and slid his arms around my waist, kissing the top of my head. “I just wanted to make sure she hadn't given you the wrong information.”

“No, this one is all on me.” I sighed.

“How about instead of making one of my favorites, you make one of your favorites?”

“My favorites are all take out,” I said.

“Then make something on your favorite things to make list.”

I leaned my head against his chest. Everything I'd made lately had been bland at best. My forays into Fat Fighter recipes hadn't been exactly mind-blowing gastric delights. What was my favorite thing to make?

“Cinnamon toast,” I finally said.

He drew back. “That sounds delicious, actually.”

“Really?”

“Really. It's been years since I've had cinnamon toast. I have some sausages, and I think I have milk and orange juice.”

“Breakfast for dinner,” I said, leaning up to kiss him lightly.

“Breakfast for dinner,” he repeated, pulling me in for a deeper kiss.

We worked side by side in the kitchen, the window now closed, the acrid smell almost gone, and I was finally able to let the clench in my stomach ease a bit. I still needed to talk to Tony about Scott's phone call. But as we laid the table for our simple meal and sat, side by side, enjoying the juicy sausages and the crisp caramelized sugar and cinnamon, I felt such a strong, stable foundation under me that I could believe whatever lay ahead of us was something we could handle.

As we polished off the toast, I said, “Okay, confession time. I wanted to cook something special because I need to have a serious talk with you.”

He stopped in mid-chew.

Instantly, I felt the urge to backpedal. It had been such a lovely meal, even with the pandemonium that preceded it. Springing this on him now didn't feel like I'd been preparing him. It felt like I was sucker-punching him. 

But I needed to be honest with him, and I didn't know how else to get to the truth without the whole truth.

“It's not that bad. But, it is about something that happened when we were apart.”

Tony swallowed and sat back in his chair. I could see him steel himself for what was coming.

I hated that he found that necessary.

“You have to listen all the way through, because I think once I've said everything, you're going to see that it's not as bad as it could be.” Good grief. That didn't sound the least bit comforting. I took a deep breath. “I'm just going to spit it out. You know Trisha and Scott Watson?”

“Of course.”

Of course he did. We'd all grown up together in the tiny town of Idalou, Texas, and it just wasn't possible to live in a town that size and not know someone the same age as you.

“I mean, you remember that they were together in high school and got married after they got out of college?”

He nodded.

“Well, here's what happened. The night before their wedding day—the day that was supposed to be their wedding—Scott's friends gave him a bachelor party. I showed up there. To be honest, I have no memory of how I got there. I'm sure we heard from somewhere that there was a party, and...and anyway.”

Tony remained frozen and my heart pounded. Things were going to sound a lot worse before they sounded better.

“You remember Rick Barlow? He was there. And he didn't really care for Trisha. He wanted to play a trick on her. A mean trick. So he got me and Scott into bed together and let her find us that way the next morning.” I reached across the table, not quite touching his hand, but almost. “Tony, nothing happened. I was very drunk, Scott was very drunk, we both passed out. Rick was there and he knew for a fact that nothing happened, but he let Trisha and Scott both believe that it had. She came in the next morning—apparently, he was late for his own wedding—and found us like that and assumed what anyone would naturally assume.”

Tony shook his head. “What an awful thing to do to someone.”

“She was devastated. They broke up. She moved away and cut off all contact with him. Eventually, they got back together because he just refused to let her go. He just...loved her too much to let her walk away. He followed after her and kept hounding her until she let him back in. They reconciled and got married, but it took two years of him pursuing her relentlessly.”

Tony was staring at the table now, his jaw clenched. He didn't say anything.

It hit me suddenly that maybe he'd heard that last bit as a condemnation of him. I had left him, and he'd let me go. He waited for me, but he didn't chase after me. The me of many years and many lessons ago had found fault with that, but I understood now and even admired what he'd done—or not done. It took a lot of faith to put an important part of your life on hold and wait for someone else to grow up, with no real indication that they ever would.

I reached further and took his hand. “Do you remember when Lucinda Cruz was found, and they used that horrible picture of me in the news story?”

He nodded, coming out of his reverie. “Sure. I thought that was weird.”

“That's how Trisha and I came back into contact. She saw on the video that I was the one who found the body, and she dug up an old arrest photo of me and ran the story with it. Which was awful, by the way. She managed to make it sound like I was under some kind of suspicion for Lucinda's murder. That's what people kept thinking—that I'd been arrested for murder.”

Again, I cringed. He knew firsthand what that was like, because he had been the one arrested and charged, in fact. Viv and I had been able to prove that he hadn't done it, which was when I found out that Tony and I weren't as divorced as I thought we were.

“I could have sued her and the station ten different ways for that, and I went up to the station to tell her just that, but in that confrontation, I learned about the whole nightmare with Scott. I had blocked out the entire thing. Even after she reminded me, only bits and pieces came back. I remembered vaguely being at the party, and I remembered the next morning when she found us in that bed. Her screaming and crying, throwing my shoes at me and pushing me down the sidewalk. The few years before and after that were so alcohol soaked that it didn't even stand out to me. Not until I sobered up, and it was years later, and I could see how much it still hurt Trisha.”

Tony took a deep breath and squeezed my hand, but he kept silent and let me finish.

“She forgave Scott, but she had no desire to forgive me, even though I was sincerely sorry and told her so. It wasn't until that night when Thomas and Rey had us in that car, with Rick, that he told me that nothing had happened. Everyone, including me, assumed the worst. But it hadn't happened. He was quite sure.”

Tony breathed then, and I realized he'd been holding his breath. Tony knew that I had not been faithful to him in the time we were apart. I thought we were divorced and hadn't considered it adultery. So, he knew on one level, of course. But the idea of my adultery and the fact of it—having a face to put it on, an exact time—those two things were worlds apart.

My heart caved into my chest and I wanted suddenly and fervently to be able to tell him that none of it had happened—none of the other guys, none of those years had been spent with me drinking my way through one relationship after another. I would have given everything I had to be able to say that.

But I couldn't. All I could do was squeeze his hand and let him know that I was with him, that I loved him, that I was his completely.

“The only reason I'm telling you this now, Tony, is that I need you to understand why it's so important to me to help Trisha and Scott. I kept them apart for two years.”

“Rick Barlow did that.”

“I was part of it. I know it wasn't my idea, but drunk or not, I went along with it.” My throat closed and I had to squeeze out the last part. “I didn't say no, Tony.” I remembered that I had actually protested, half-heartedly. But I was drunk, and Rick said it would be funny. I was all about the funny. Hey, get me! I slept with your fiancé. Ha-freaking-ha.

“Trisha and I have talked about this a few times. She's told me the hell she went through during those two years. She was destroyed. Her heart broken. Just imagine how awful that was—It was her wedding day. She'd planned for months and then had to call it all off at the last second. It took her two years to forgive him and trust him again. That kind of experience, Tony—it has an effect on a person.”

“I know that.”

Of course, he knew that.

Now it was time for me to take a deep breath. “So, you understand that when Scott asked me to do something for Trisha, I really wanted to do it.”

“What has he asked you to do?”

“Trisha is convinced that Peter Browning could not have committed suicide. She's offended by the very idea, in fact. It's as if the concept of Peter Browning choosing to kill himself is some kind of betrayal that she can't get past. Scott says she's become obsessed by this suspicion that Peter was murdered, and the case isn't going to be fully investigated because the police are writing it off as suicide. Scott asked us—me and Viv—to look into it so maybe she would stop worrying about it so much. He's afraid she's going to harm the baby with all her worry.”

He sighed and remained silent, his dark eyes on mine.

“Tony, here's the thing. Scott said this morning that sometimes he'll catch Trisha looking at him like she's wondering what secrets he's hiding. This...” I shrugged, unsure on how to put into words what my concern was. “This fear that people are hiding things from her...” I felt my throat catch. “Maybe she's not thinking this on a conscious level, but I have to think that fear goes back to that awful bachelor party.”

He took another deep breath, frowning, but still didn't say anything.

“Look, you haven't come right out and asked me to stop doing these crazy little—investigations or whatever you would call them—with Viv. But I know you don't want me to do it.”

“I don't want you to do it.”

“Right.” Actually, I had kind of hoped that when push came to shove he would say something more along the lines of, 'No, it's your life, I'm fully supportive of whatever makes you happy.' But...

“But Scott is seriously worried about her. He would have to be for him to even call me. And I still feel some kind of...I don't know. Like I owe them.”

“That's guilt talking, Salem.”

“Well, yeah.” Of course, it was.

“You're not guilty. You didn't plan that.”

“No, but I was there. I was part of something that hurt her tremendously.”

“Salem, did you ask Trisha for forgiveness?”

“Of course.”

“And did you ask God for forgiveness?”

“Yes, Tony, but—”

“Then you're forgiven. This isn't on you anymore. You've made atonement.”

“Have I? Tony, seriously, if you could have seen how she still agonized over it.” I would never forget the day I'd met Trisha again after ten years. The pain in her eyes was still so raw.

“But nothing happened.”

“A lot happened. She faced an entire wedding party, with guests and everything, and told them the wedding was off. How awful must that have been?”

“Salem, I understand that you have so much sympathy for Trisha. That's admirable. But you should be clear on your motives.”

“I want to help Trisha. I want to make up for—”

He lifted his hand and stopped me. “You want to make up for.”

I studied him for a moment. “But...why is that bad, Tony?”

“It's not bad. It's just...Salem, it's an exercise in futility. For one thing, nothing you could do would ever make up for that. I think you know that. You can't undo what was done. You could work for the rest of your life and it wouldn't undo whatever Trisha and Scott felt that day. That year.” He took my hand back and touched my cheek with his other hand. “And for another, you're forgiven. It's washed clean. Not because of something you did, but because of grace.”

I didn't say anything, but my frustration must have shown on my face, because he smiled and kissed the tip of my nose. “Salem. You're a Christian.”

“I know that.”

“Every Sunday you say the Apostle's Creed. Come on. Say it with me. I believe in the forgiveness of sins. Come on. Say it.”

I rolled my eyes, then grudgingly said, “I believe in the forgiveness of sins.”

“What's that? Did you say you believe in the forgiveness of sins, except for Salem's?”

“Tony, stop. You sound like a hip high school Sunday school teacher.”

He laughed. “No, this is taking it out of Sunday school. This is it, where the rubber meets the road. Do you believe what you said or not?”

“Sure, but...”

“But what? It doesn't count if you just say it and don't live it.”

“I am living it. Did I not just this very day talk to my mother on the phone for fifteen whole minutes? I practice forgiveness.”

“Not for yourself.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Turns out I had nothing to say to that.

He kissed me again. He put his hands on both sides of my face, his nose less than an inch from mine. “You asked me one time if I could forgive you. I can. I have. It doesn't mean that memory of the time we spent apart doesn't hurt. But when I look at you, there's no doubt in my mind. I forgive you.”

Not much I could do except sniff back tears and hope my nose didn't start pouring snot.

“But Salem, I don't see how we're going to make this work if you can't forgive yourself.”

“I have.”

“Bull.”

“Okay, but I know I should. That's a first step, right?”

He was right. I knew he was right. From the perspective of hindsight, I could see how so many of my crazy actions had been motivated by guilt. Guilt for conceiving the baby that had made Tony and me a teenage bride and groom, meaning he had to forfeit his bright future. Resentment when that guilt welled up. Anger that he insisted that we were still married and could still make it work, after my car was t-boned and I lost the baby. Guilt that I hadn't been strong enough to keep that baby alive in me. Guilt that his heart was broken, too, that I'd ripped his future away, then ripped his family away, even though by the time of the accident, I was also half in love with that still-nameless baby.

I dealt with it the only way I knew how. When he pushed for us to stay close, to help each other heal, I pushed him away. I did everything I could to make him angry, make him hate me the way I knew I should be hated. When he refused, I left, and set about burning every bridge I could find.

Guilt had created a lot of destruction in my life, so I knew he was speaking wisdom. I did have to forgive myself. But how?

“I don't know how,” I finally whispered.

“I know,” he said. He kissed me, once on the lips, then softly on each eyelid, now wet with tears. “But promise me, we'll figure it out, okay?”

“Okay.” More sniffing.

“One thing I know, it's not going to happen with you running around devoting your life to making up for stuff.”

“You do know I kept you out of jail by trying to make up for what I'd done to you?”

He gave me a flat look that made me laugh.

“Okay, yes, I'll give you that one,” he said.

I giggled and sniffed again, drawing back to swipe at my nose, then reached behind me for a box of tissues on the bar.

He studied me while I wiped away tears. “Look, Salem. I worry about you chasing after bad guys. I don't like the idea of you facing down another guy with a gun and only Viv there for protection.”

“Viv carries a gun, too.”

“That's not supposed to give me comfort, is it?”

“It doesn't comfort me,” I admitted.

“But you're a grown woman and you can make your own decisions. I mean, it's not like I'm going to forbid you from doing it or anything.”

“Oh, come on. You're not?”

“Mmmm, of course not. What exactly would you do if I did forbid it?”

“Use your unreasonable authoritarianism as an excuse to do it anyway.” I swatted at him. “You've totally messed up my plan.”

He grabbed my hand and brought my fingers to his lips. “I worry about you. How much danger do you think there is in this thing with Browning?”

I shrugged. “Probably none. The odds are on suicide, so there's no other bad guy with a gun to find. But apparently, Trisha has a whole list of possible suspects we can go through. Scott said he found a bunch of files and searches on her computer.”

“This is starting to sound like a lot more than none.”

“I tell you what. We'll look through the notes Trisha has collected. It's probably nothing—just Trisha trying to process something very difficult at a time when her hormones are out of whack. We might talk to some people, but only in open spaces in broad daylight. We won't meet anyone in dark alleys.”

“Or abandoned houses.”

“That was one time, and I learned my lesson.” I held my palm up. “Promise.”

––––––––

Viv was recovered enough from her 'near-drowning' experience to be raring to go by noon the next day.

“I have four more dogs to finish,” I said. I'll be done around 3:00.”

“Shoot. Well, I guess I'll have to just do more research while I wait.”

“Did you get ungrounded?”

She made a noise that could have meant anything, but actually indicated nothing. “Pick me up behind the miniature golf course.”

“You're sneaking out?”

“Salem, a woman's life is at stake here, and the life of her child. This is no time to worry about what these medical professionals are going to say.”

She was making air quotes again, I could tell. “So you're sneaking out.”

“I'm sneaking out. Text me when you're close and I'll meet you there.”

I swung by Trailertopia to drop Stump off with Frank, then headed to Belle Court. The miniature golf course was on the back side of the campus, deserted in the mid-November chill. I slowed the Monster Carlo and looked for Viv.

Nobody I knew had a more beautiful “obviously incognito” look than Viv Kennedy. I pulled into the miniature golf lot and didn't see her. But as I circled the lot, she came running out from behind the big windmill. She had tied a scarf around her hair and wore sunglasses with lenses as big as coffee cans. She high-step ran toward the Monster Carlo, darting glances behind her as she went, giggling.

She threw herself into the passenger seat and shouted, “Go go go!”

I went.

On the ride to Channel 11, I briefed Viv on the important points while she got her act together. “Scott doesn't want her to know he talked to me.”

Viv nodded, her face set. “Totally on the down low. Got it.”

“We need to make it seem like this is her idea.”

“Right-o.”

“She's convinced Peter Browning was murdered, so we need to find out exactly why she thinks that, and we need to reassure her that we're going to get to the bottom of things.”

“He was, and we will.”

I glanced over at her. She'd taken off the scarf. “You're wearing a fascinator under your scarf?”

“Yep. Change in costume, you know. Mix things up a bit. Keep people on their toes.”

“Nigel?” I asked.

“He was coming in from the miniature golf course as I was getting ready to go out. I don't think he even saw me, though. Too busy acting all concerned for Anne, who apparently forgot how to play miniature golf.”

“Anyway. What makes you so sure Browning was murdered?”

“Demons, Salem,” she said. “The man was wrestling with demons.”

“Okay. And what makes you so sure we'll get to the bottom of things?”

“We always do.”

I had to allow that. So what if we'd had less than half a dozen “things” to get to the bottom of? We did, indeed, have a 100 percent success rate.

The receptionist at Channel 11 didn't even bother asking why we were there. She looked up from her phone long enough to take in the fascinator, then motioned toward the offices with a tilt of her head.

Tri-Patrice was in her office with her feet up, issuing orders over the phone and in person to one employee after another. Viv and I took a seat.

Viv didn't waste any time getting to the point as soon as Trisha didn't have a phone to her ear or an intern at her door.

“Listen, you're obviously busy, so we won't keep you. It's just that Salem and I have been talking about this Peter Browning thing, and something seems very...chalk and cheese about it all.”

“Chalk and cheese?” I drew my head back. “Is that another one of your British things? What does that even mean?”

Viv looked at her lap and frowned. “I don't actually know.”

Trisha threw me an amused look. “Like, things don't add up?” she offered.

“Exactly! Do you get the feeling the Lubbock PD isn't really investigating this as thoroughly as they could?”

Trisha's feet dropped to the floor and she said, “Yes! Right? I mean, they find a note, and it's not even a full note, it's one sentence that could have meant anything. And immediately they're like, 'Case closed!' and move on.”

“We keep hearing about this note,” Viv said. “Where did they find a note?”

“Bitsy said they told her it was in the car. And it said almost nothing. I didn't mean it to turn out like this. I mean, come on. That could mean anything.”

“You said the police have moved on. But, have they? Have they said the case was closed?”

“Who knows?” Trisha said with evident scorn. “I call every day and I get no information. They asked a few questions at first, but then nothing. It's as if it didn't even happen.” She shook her head. “Poor Bitsy.”

Viv and I waited in silence for a few seconds, waiting for her to realize there were two somewhat seasoned investigators sitting immediately across from her.

Finally, I said, “So the police are saying nothing? Even though you guys worked with Peter and knew his schedule and everything?”

“Exactly. I mean, most of us spend more time at work than we do at home, and we know all about each other's lives. But all they'll tell me is they're waiting for the report from the medical examiner. Which could take weeks. And in the meantime, whoever did this has plenty of time to destroy evidence and get away.” She shook her head in disgust. “I gave them a list of messages I had taken in the last few months, people who'd called in or emailed to complain about a story Peter had done. I don't think they've followed up on any of them.” She parked her feet back up on the box beside her desk and settled her hands over her stomach.

I couldn't help myself—I had to come to Bobby Sloan's defense. “It could just be that they don't want to share that information with you. They might be doing all kinds of interviews.”

“Maybe, but I doubt it. They didn't even ask me for the list, you know. I volunteered it. And I added a couple of ringers—my hairdresser, for one. I said she'd called to complain about a story Peter had done about that police toy drive at Christmas—you remember that whole mess with the Space Cop toy? I thought they might follow up on that, but they never called her.”

“Maybe they just haven't gotten to her yet. I mean, doing the kinds of stories he did, he had to have a lot of enemies,” I said.

“He did.” Trisha nodded. “People hated him. I know. I got to handle a lot of the complaint calls.”

“You definitely don't need to be dealing with stuff like that. Not in your condition. And you shouldn't be worrying about Peter Browning, either.”

“You sound like my husband.”

I hid my cringe.

“It's true,” Viv said. “Besides, Salem and I are in a better position to look into this a little more. We could follow up on those names, if you want.”

I gave her the side-eye. So much for letting Trisha think it was her idea. I supposed the main thing was, though, that she not know Scott had put us up to it, and there was very little chance she'd even think of that.

Trisha leaned back and looked at the ceiling. Then she turned back to us, her eyes intense. “I suppose you could. I mean, the police haven't asked me not to share the information I have. Would you conduct a whole investigation, like you did with CJ Hardin and Lucinda Cruz?”

“And the High Point Bandits,” Viv reminded her.

“And the Braswell Maltese kidnapping,” I added, for good measure. What's the point in having a 100 percent success rate if you can't brag about it?

Trisha twisted her mouth like she was thinking about it, then she turned to her computer and clicked a few things. Behind her, a printer began to whirr.

“I'm going to print up what I have. It's probably a mess, but it made sense to me. The first file is all transcripts of stories that Peter did that were somewhat controversial. Basically, it comes down to two events, though—the Space Cop thing and the school collapse. Well, the school collapse and all the fracking earthquake stories. That all kind of ties together.”

I watched with a faint sense of trepidation as the stack of printer paper grew. She clicked a few things. The printer beeped and kept going.

“Okay, I'm sending some instructions to your phones,” she said, her fingers clicking away at the keys. “This will explain things as you're looking through the notes.”

Viv and I watched silently, and I realized that this was what it must be like to be one of Trisha's co-workers. Those junior reporters probably sat just like this while she handed down their instructions. No, they probably stood at full attention.

Trisha sat back and studied her screen, her brow creased. She clicked a few things and scrolled her mouse, then picked up her phone.

“Jessica, will you come in here, please?”

Before I could have counted to three, the door opened and the camera girl who had been at the Veterans Day ceremony entered. “Yes?”

“I sent you that list of names and notes to organize and send to the Lubbock PD, right?”

She nodded. “Yes. Monday, I think.”

“Can you send that back to me, please? I can't seem to find it.”

Jessica nodded. “Sure. No problem.” She left without appearing to notice that Viv and I were even there.

Trisha stood and pulled the papers out of the printer, tamped them together and then slid them into a manila folder. Her computer dinged softly, and she bent to look at the email she'd just received. She studied it for a second, then printed it as well.

“Okay, I'm putting the list of names on top. Here's the thing. We rarely take down messages from disgruntled viewers because we get disgruntled viewers all the time. People are mad because they want us to cover their kid's school event and we don't. They're mad when we release names that they don't think should be released, or when we don't release names that they think we should. Sometimes, I swear to you, sometimes they're mad at us when the news is bad, and sometimes they call up here and want to talk to Matt Lauer.”

“Seriously?” Viv said. “What do you do then? Ask them to look out their window and ask if they're looking at skyscrapers or wind turbines?”

“If they're nice, we give them the number to the NBC studio in New York. If they're rude, we put them on hold, and eventually they give up. My point is, there were probably calls we should have noted and didn't. Hindsight, you know. But when things get especially hairy, I try to take as many notes as I can, just in case. Those two events were two of the hairier ones I can remember in the recent past, so I started asking for contact information when people called about those two events. Sometimes they won't give it to you, of course, and I don't always have time to write everything down anyway. Even when I do write it down, I can't always read it or understand what it means when I'm typing up notes later. So it's entirely possible that I missed something significant because I didn't recognize it at the time.” She frowned.

I took the folder from her. “No problem. We'll start with this, and we'll see what floats to the top. Maybe if we can narrow down a few leads, we'll meet with you again and see if that triggers any more memories.”

She sat down with a sigh, looking a little relieved. “I'm so glad you guys came by. I think everyone thinks I'm crazy. I know Scott does.”

“I'm sure he doesn't think you're crazy,” Vi said. “He's probably just concerned about your health and the baby's health. Now that we're on the case, promise me, Love, that you'll relax about this and take care of yourself.”

Trisha raised her eyebrows at me. Love?

Then I remembered how Viv had spent the past few days. “Miss Marple?”

“Oh, I love those!” Trisha said, grinning. Then she gave Viv a look. “You make an awfully hip Miss Marple, though.”

“I know,” Viv said, looking unhappy.

“Well, I mean...you have the detective skills, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Viv agreed.

“But the little old lady frumpy stuff...you're going to have a hard time pulling that off,” Trish said.

“I know,” Viv said again, looking even unhappier. “I don't think I even pulled off the 'Love' bit.”

“Sure you did,” I said, rubbing her arm. “I bought it.” That probably fell under the heading of “bearing false witness,” but I felt God would understand I was doing it to lift up a friend in need.

“Oh!” Trisha said, as if she'd just remembered something. “I forgot about the videos. I'm going to send you a link to the videos I saved on our server. Wait. No, I can't give you access to that.” She stopped and stared down at her desk for a moment, thinking. “I'll copy them to my personal cloud storage and give you a link to that.”

Viv and I looked at each other. Whatever else fell under the heading of our “area of expertise,” servers and cloud storages most definitely did not. I was the least tech-savvy twenty-something in the civilized world.

Trisha clicked a couple more things, then turned back to us. She correctly interpreted the looks on our faces. “They're just videos. All you have to do is click the link I send you, and then play the videos.” She nodded toward the folder in my hands. “Those are the printed transcripts, and the videos are what we showed on the newscast, plus some links to surveillance videos from different spots around town. Nothing major.”

I stood, a bit overwhelmed at the job ahead of us. But Trisha really did look relieved, and that made me feel better. Whether we deserved it or not, she clearly thought of me as something other than a “heel-grabber,” as did Scott. Otherwise he wouldn't have called, and Trisha wouldn't have handed over all of her notes.

Now all I had to do was prove their faith wasn't misplaced. And not get myself shot at in the process, or Tony would be so mad.

––––––––

Back at the Monster Carlo, I tossed Viv the keys so she could drive while I sifted through the folder. By the time we were back on the loop, I was overwhelmed again. “What in the world are we supposed to do with all this?”

“What we always do,” Viv said. “Investigate.”

“Yeah, but...” This looked an awful lot like a haystack that probably had no needle in it. “All we really do is go around and ask people nosy questions.”

“You act like that's not investigating. Let's go get a cuppa and decide what nosy questions we need to ask.”

Viv pulled into a little coffee shop on 34^th Street and we carried our notes in and found a booth. A waitress came over.

“I'll have a cup of Earl Grey, hot,” Viv said.

The waitress looked confused.

“It's tea, Love. Hot tea.”

Her face cleared. “We have Lipton, I think.”

“Hot?”

She looked at Viv like she was crazy. “Um, no. It's iced.”

Viv sighed.

“I'll have coffee,” I said. “Black.”

“I guess I'll have coffee, too,” Viv said with a put-upon look.

I skimmed through the notebook. I had to hand it to Trisha. Even her borderline-paranoid ravings were organized. The stories fell under two headings, just as she'd said. The first was the Lubbock PD/Space Cop scandal, and the other was related to the earthquake and school collapse in March.

“Do you think it's weird that both stories are almost a year old?” I asked Viv. 

She shrugged. “Cheers, Love,” she said as the waitress placed our coffee cups at the table. Then to me, “Not really. I mean, the earthquake was a while ago, but the fallout is still going on. That architecture firm just closed down, what—three months ago? And then Baucum's death two months ago.”

“Trisha has 'Baucum Engineering employees' on the list. I guess a lot of people were laid off when it closed.”

“It might take a couple of months for things to go off the rails for them. Picture it—trouble finding a new job, savings dwindling, the family is facing possible bankruptcy, maybe a move to a new town. Have to sell the house—the dream home they planned to retire in. The teenager who just made the cheerleading squad has to give it up, start over with a bunch of new kids she doesn't know.”

“Or he,” I said. “Don't be sexist.”

“So you can see how a desperate architect father—”

“Or engineer mother,” I interrupted, “Since it's an engineering firm, and women go to college now. Don't be sexist,” I said to the least sexist person I knew.

She went on as if I hadn't said a word, “—could get so beaten down he—or she—traces the whole disaster back to Peter Browning's investigative reports.”

“Not the guy who helped design the building that collapsed in a relatively low-level earthquake?” I asked.

She shrugged again. “For one thing, he's already gone by this time. For another, that's someone our baddie knew—”

“If there is a baddie, and if the baddie is from Baucum Engineering.” I sipped my coffee. “The Baucum Baddie. I like it.”

“It has a nice ring. The point is, I don't see anything off about the time line.” She thumbed through the papers. “Heavens. This is a lot of paper.”

“I know. Want to watch the videos first?”

“Absolutely.” She pulled out her phone and I joined her on that side of the booth.

“Let’s look at the surveillance videos first. I’ve seen all of Peter Browning’s reports, but I haven’t seen all of those.”

Unfortunately, we couldn’t get any of those links to work. After several false starts, we eventually asked the waitress for help. She tried for a few minutes, then pulled her son from the back office where he was doing his homework.

He was maybe thirteen years old and in need of a haircut. He also seemed a little annoyed to be bothered, but eventually we were able to explain to him what we wanted and he took over.

“You don’t need links for that,” he said.  “You can type in a search for webcams and then find what you’re looking for.”

“Those would just be live feeds, though, right? We’re looking at history.”

He nodded, typing something new into the browser. “Lots of places store their surveillance history in the cloud, so you just have to know...” He tucked his tongue over his bottom lip as his thumbs danced over the keyboard. “Not all of them, but a lot of them. You just have to know where to find them.” He looked at me from under his shaggy hair and said, “I’m bookmarking it for you so you can find it again. Go to the camera you want to see, then type in the date, and it’ll bring up everything recorded on that day.”

“And how do you know about all this?” his mother asked.

He rolled his eyes. “It’s common knowledge, Mom.”

“It’s not common to me. What kind of things are you looking at through these webcams?”

“They’re out in the open. It’s not like there are any webcams in a girl’s bedroom on this site.”

She frowned but said, “Okay, you. Get back to your homework.”

He turned to follow her back to the office, then turned back and whispered, “The bedroom cams are on a different site. Let me know if you want to see them.”

The surveillance videos were interesting for about eight minutes. Basically, though, it was just watching people live their normal lives, which we could do by looking out the window. We watched the footage of the school collapse, but it was exactly like it was in the news story, so we figured we might as well get started on that.

We clicked the first link to Browning’s stories, then Viv clicked the big sideways triangle to play the video.

The first video was the story right after the earthquake. I didn't need to be reminded of that—we had all watched the footage over and over again, as one does after a huge event. But this was the report put together a few days afterward, with video from different cameras around town, and words scrolled onto the screen between videos.

Browning’s somber voice began the voice-over: It began like any other afternoon.

Trisha—or Patrice, of course—sits beside the news desk, talking to the little camera girl, the one Trisha had called Jessica. Browning is behind her, talking to the sports guy.

Then the camera begins to shake. All four of them straighten, look around. Trisha and Jessica both grab the news desk. The men end their conversation, step apart, look beyond the camera.

The camera shifts, points at nothing, then at the lights on a bar across the high ceiling. The lights shake noticeably, but not wildly. 

Then everything shakes. In the background, people scream.

The scene changes to the roll of a seismograph. The paper crawls across the screen and the blue line jumps, low at first, then spikes a little. Then low again. Then spikes, much larger this time. The screen pans in with a tight focus on that spike as it jumps wildly up and down.

Six-point-two on the Richter scale. The largest earthquake ever recorded in the southwest.

The scene then switches to various security cameras around town. A convenience store counter, where a man stands looking out the front window. Suddenly, he grabs the counter, trying to save overtoppling displays before he's thrown to the ground.

A used car lot, a salesman walking in the distance, two guys looking at a pickup in the foreground. They all stop, look at the sky. The salesman stumbles. The two guys crouch beside the pickup, hanging on to it.

We had never felt anything like it before.

A teenage girl's video of her and her friend showing off their new sunglasses and giggling. They stop, clutch each other, still giggling as they felt the first tremors, but then shrieking in terror as the ground quakes hard beneath them.

A mom, recording her young daughter and a grown man, as the man holds the back of the little girl's bicycle seat, encouraging her to keep peddling, keep peddling, she had it. Suddenly the bike wobbles and he stumbles. The girl doesn’t catch on at first, thinks she is just falling, but the dad grabs the bike, drags it to a stop, and looks at the camera, eyes wide. “Was that...?” the woman says. Then the ground shakes, the girl falls, the dad falls, the camera falls, pointing at blue sky and bare tree branches shaking.  The girl cries while the mom tries to her reassure her, her own voice verging on panic.

Then back to Peter Browning, walking down a sidewalk on a cloudy day. An empty field spread behind him, and as he slowly walked, the corner of a building came into view, then a curb behind his feet.

“Just last year, News Channel 11 did a special report on the 45th anniversary of the EF5 tornado that struck Lubbock in 1970. I had the privilege of talking to many people who shared with me their personal stories of where they were and what they were doing when the tornado hit. I was struck by what a pivotal event that was to so many people. All those years later, they still remembered it as if it had happened the day before.”

“Little tool,” Viv said. “Forty-five years isn't that long.” She sipped her coffee.

“I could sympathize,” Browning went on. “but I couldn't relate. At least, not until March 11.”

The scene went back to the Channel 11 studio, where Patrice Watson and Tom Timmons were now at their desks, Browning standing beside them. Tri-Patrice was calm but alert, Tom was calm but alert, and Browning looked serious and thrilled at the same time.

“For those of you just tuning in, we have confirmed with the United States Geological Survey that what we experienced at 4:24 this afternoon was, in fact, an earthquake. What you just felt was an earthquake.”

Back to Browning on the sidewalk on the cloudy day, where the scene behind him is now fully revealed. NorthStar Elementary. The only building in the area to sustain major damage from the quake.

“I'll never forget the experience of my first major earthquake. Nothing can prepare you for the feeling of the very world around you falling apart. But as powerful as that experience was for me, it will never compare to the experience of one local family.”

The camera rose, away from Browning, taking in the front of the school building, pristine and new, the ground still bare of grass, a few little twig trees surrounded by their round water moats. We saw the flat roof of the long, wide school building, where it was easy to imagine hundreds of noisy kids running around inside, moving between classrooms, school bells ringing, teachers herding kindergartners.

Then, with a rise in perspective of a degree or two, the scene took in the devastation at the back of the building—the gym wall collapsed, a pile of rubble, a gaping hole where a gymnasium roof should have been.

“Camera drone,” Viv said. “Fancy.”

The scene switched once again: the same location from a slightly different perspective, ambulance and police car lights flashing brightly against the darkening night. A small crowd gathered behind the police car. Stretchers being rolled down the new sidewalk. A man, face and head bloody and covered with white dust, the lower part of his body draped by a white sheet. He was looking back, though, twisting on the gurney even as one of the women pushing it was trying to get him to straighten and face forward.

A second gurney enters the scene now, the body on it much smaller. Half covered. Not fully covered, thankfully. A small blond head showed, dusty and still, streaked with blood, above the blanket.

As the camera closed in, the second gurney drew even with the first, and the man reached out, grappled with the blanket on the second stretcher, and took hold of the small hand he found there.

Browning came back to tell about Matthew Logan, the foreman of the construction company that built the school. He'd been the man on that first stretcher, and his daughter was the small blonde on the second one. They'd both been crushed under the collapsed gymnasium wall. He had a broken leg, broken ribs and collar bone, but expected to recover fully. His daughter's recovery was not quite as easy to predict, Browning said.

“Hmm,” Viv said. We both knew now what Browning had not when this video was made: the girl lived, but would never walk again.

That video ended and Viv clicked the next one. In it, Browning interviewed the man and his wife in their home, a few weeks after the quake. The man wore a cast on his lower leg, and the cuts on his face and head were mostly healed. He was the foreman for the construction company that had built the school, which was scheduled to open the week after spring break. He and his family had been in the school building when the earthquake hit. His wife and two other children were in the hallway of the school and had been safe. He and his eight-year-old daughter had gone into the gym and were buried under the rubble of the collapsed roof and wall.

Viv and I were both holding back tears by the time it was over. The man choked up when he told about how proud he was to be able to show his family the building he'd been working on for the past year, the building they would attend school in for the last part of the year.

Why was it so much more awful when men cried than when women did? Viv sniffed hard, blew her nose into a napkin from the dispenser on the table, and clicked the next link.

This time, Peter Browning was interviewing a USGS expert who said that earthquakes were certainly rare in our area, but the possibility shouldn't be ruled out, especially considering the increase in hydraulic fracturing, injection wells, and tremor incidents in and around Texas.

Another interview with the same USGS guy, who talked about the increase in small earthquakes and how we need to accept that tremors and injection wells go hand in hand, and either adapt to that or ban the use of injection wells.

“What are injection wells?” I asked.

Viv shrugged. “Something to do with fracking,” Viv said.

But as she said it, Browning went into a description of the wells.

“Hydraulic fracturing—or fracking, as it's widely known—is the process of shooting water, sand, and chemicals into shale beneath the earth's surface in order to break up and extract petroleum from the shale layers deep underground.” 

In the background, an animation ran of a pipe drilling into the ground, past different colored layers of earth, deep under a thick blue layer marked with the words “ground water,” through a few more layers, and then sideways. Blue dots representing water then shot down the pipe and out of what must be tiny holes in the end of the pipe. Tiny cracks appeared in the rock layer. Fractures. The tiny blue dots were then joined by black and brown dots, and the process reversed itself, back up to above ground. The dots then separated, with the black going into one tank and the blue and brown ones into another.

“Back above ground, the oil is separated from the water and sand, which is either used again on more fracking, or disposed of according to EPA regulations.”

“That seems like an awful lot of trouble,” I said.

“Getting oil has never been the easiest job in the world,” Viv said. “Jed Clampett made it look too easy.”

On screen, Browning gestured with his hands as he tried, emphatically, to educate his audience.

“For several years, as you probably know, there has been speculation about the link between fracking and increased earthquake incidents. Scientists now believe it's not the actual fracking process that is causing the quakes, but rather the process of injecting the waste water from the drilling back underground. In other words, the use of injection wells.”

On screen, the black dots were pumped into a little cartoon tanker truck, which drove away as the blue and brown dots were once again pumped down to rest below the ground water table.

“The EPA has determined that the disposal of this waste water is not a threat to our drinking water, but what is coming to light now is that this process—this practice of pumping that water back underground—is actually lubricating these layers of rock that have, for thousands and millions of years—”

“Thousands and millions,” Viv scoffed.

“Rested against each other.” He pointed out the layers in the picture. “The pressure of these enormous layers of rock, stacked so far below the earth's surface, has kept them from shifting.” In front of him, Browning held his hands flat, palm to palm. His upper arms stiffened as he increased the pressure. “What scientists are saying is that these layers of water between rock are decreasing that pressure –” He drew his hands slightly apart. “and making it easier for them to –” He slid his hands apart. “slide against each other. As they did the afternoon NorthStar Elementary collapsed.”

“Good lord, you are boring,” Viv said. She ended that video and clicked the next one.

The next story began with a map of the United States, with bubbles popping up all over the country, then individual pictures of structural failings. A shopping center, another school, several highway retaining walls, a bridge collapse. A stack of papers labeled “Engineering Report” dropped onto a desk, with a dramatic red stamp that read “SAFE.” On top of that, another stack, titled “Earthquake Risk” landed, stamped “HIGH RISK.”

“Drama queen,” Viv pronounced, and clicked the next link. I sipped my coffee and didn't comment. It seemed bad form to be disrespectful of the guy just a week or so after he died, but I had to agree. He seemed to relish this all to an unseemly degree. I guess that kind of excitement was what made him good at his job, though.

On Viv's phone screen, the drama queen was back.

“Unless you're new to the area, you will probably recognize the Baucum name. Baucum Engineering has been involved in such jobs as the new Texas Tech football stadium, the four new elementary school campuses for Lubbock ISD, and a host of other high-profile projects. Not only that, but locally the Baucum name is synonymous with heroism. David Baucum's grandfather was one of the first soldiers on the beaches of Normandy, before D-Day. Interestingly enough, that mission also involved geotechnical engineering. Take a look at this Channel 11 footage from almost forty years ago.”

The screen switched to a black and white film of hundreds of boats heading toward a beach. “Sword Beach in France, 1944. The D-Day invasion, when thousands of allied soldiers braved rough waters and enemy fire to liberate a nation under Nazi occupation. Among these thousands, however, two soldiers had the distinction of having been there before.”

The scene cut again to a man in an office, wearing a red collared shirt and a bad ‘70s comb-over. He was talking and pointing to a certificate. “For valuable and honorable service to the cause of freedom,” he read proudly. He turned and smiled at the camera.

“Before the powers that be could decide where to invade, they had to consider a lot of factors. One of the many things they had to consider was whether the beaches we landed on could hold us. Could it hold all that heavy equipment? Could we get our boats in there, get the men offloaded, without sinking into the sand and making everyone sitting ducks? They needed some volunteers to go in and take samples of the ground there, to determine whether it was a viable plan.

“I mean, that's the level of thought that went into this mission. They did their best to leave no stone unturned. Would you have thought of that?” He laughed. “I sure wouldn't have. I mean, I would now,” he laughed. “I would after spending the last thirty-something years in the field. But back then, that's the first time I learned that digging around in the dirt could give you such important, practical information. When I got out of the service and came back home and knew I needed to pick a career, well...I remembered that, and I thought that sounded like a pretty good career. And here we are.” He laughed.

“Here we are,” the reporter echoed. He looked around the office. “A pretty good career, as you say.”

Switch to the narrator voice as the screen showed Baucum and the 70s reporter studying a map on the wall of the office.

“Baucum's mission: to join other allied troops in a covert mission to obtain soil samples from the very beaches where they would land for the D-Day invasion. In the middle of the night, without the aid and protection of their fellow soldiers.”

Back to the men talking, still at the map. The reporter points to a jagged line where the sea met the sand.

“And so you snuck ashore and took soil samples from the beach?”

“That's right. We had our wet suits on, we got off the boat a mile or so off shore, and swam in during the night.”

“That must have been scary.”

“Oh, it was terrifying, let me tell you. We knew there were jerrys all over that place, just itching for something to shoot at. But we got on the beach, and they had given us these little metal tubes to poke down.” He made a motion with his hand, of prodding something into the sand. “We had to push it down, then turn it so the thing would seal up around our sample, and then pull it out again. And of course, cover up the hole and our tracks as best we could.”

“So how long was this tube?”

“Oh...” He held his hands about a foot apart. “About yay big.”

“So this entire mission hinged on something about—” The reporter held his hands apart. “About yay big.”

“That's right. Well, that and a bunch of other things. Weather, of course, and whether it was in reach of allied fighter planes, how far away was the nearest port, and a bunch of other unanswerable questions. We were able to answer one of those unanswerables, though, and that made us happy. We made a contribution, and that contribution helped turn the tide of the war.”

The screen switched to the reporter, this time standing on a sidewalk outside a stone building, a low, curving stone wall at his back. As he walked slowly down the sidewalk, the scene widened to reveal that the low wall was actually a circle, freshly laid and ready to commemorate a special occasion. He talked about his visit with Baucum, then said, “and that's why Dan Baucum is being honored this Saturday, November 11, as the nation pauses to remember our veterans.”

“Is that Belle Court?” Viv asked, tapping pause. “It is, look! There's the bell tower. Wow. They've added on a lot since then.”

“They have to,” I said. “They have to have enough room to house all those rich old widder women.”

“Pensioners,” Viv said with a sigh, shaking her head. “This is brilliant, though! I can talk about this mission with Nigel.” She dragged the little dot at the bottom of the screen back to the left, and the thumbnails flipped past: the old Belle Court, the now-tranquil Sword Beach, the flashes of gunfire and pandemonium of D-Day.

Viv paused the video again and pulled her little notebook and gold pen out of her handbag. As ‘70s Baucum talked again, I watched as she made notes. Sword Beach! 28-thousand soldiers! Secret mission authorized by Churchill himself!!

The scene changed to the modern day sidewalk in the same spot where the ‘70s reporter had stood, but this time the stone facade of the building was replaced with red brick walls and white plantation shutters. There were four-story buildings looming on the other side of the bell tower, and the 70s reporter was replaced by Peter Browning. “For almost forty years, the Baucum name has been honored, along with the names of the other veterans from the South Plains, during the annual Veterans Day remembrance ceremony. For the first time since the first Baucum Local Hero was awarded in 1978, people are questioning whether it might be time to change that.”

The stone circle was the same, with an upgrade of black lamp posts hung with flower pots flanking either side. Trees that had been sticks at the time of the ‘70s story were now solid and stately.

As he talked, the camera panned around inside the stone circle, to the names inscribed on the stones along the wall. The Local Hero Award, sponsored by Baucum Engineering, the stone in the center read. Dan Baucum's name was first on the list.  The camera panned to the side, taking in name after name around the circle.

“It's a disgrace. A disgrace to the name of that great man.” The shaky voice of an old lady came on now. “I'm not saying we should not honor Dan Baucum. We should. His courage and sacrifice must always be remembered. But it's a shame that now the name is tarnished. From now on, when that name is spoken, what people are going to think of is tragedy. Not heroism.”

Viv tapped the screen and the woman's face froze in mid-tirade. “Barbara Hale, you are a tragedy. I swear all that woman does is gripe.”

“Were you there when Browning was filming this?”

“No, I didn't see any of it. Too bad he didn't ask to interview me. I could have done better than that.”

“That camera girl, Jessica, said they didn't issue the award this year because they didn't get it organized in time. Do you think they just used that as an excuse, though—that people were really thinking about David Baucum and the school collapse and decided to skip the award this year because of that?”

“Maybe, but I doubt it. I haven't heard any talk about changing the award. I find Jessica's story a lot more plausible.”

She tapped play again, and the video continued through Barbara Hale's tirade, then moved once again to the pile of rubble at NorthStar, the red and blue ambulance lights flashing, the dad, reaching from one gurney to grab the hand of his daughter, lying still on the next gurney.

“Ugh,” I said, hitting the pause button again. “I don't know how many more times I can watch that. Of course, everyone is going to think of tragedy now because every time the Baucum name is uttered, we see this same footage.”

“We'll switch to something else. Patrice said there were some interviews with the oil company, right?” She scrolled through the list of links. “Here.”

This video opened in the inside of a wood-paneled office. A middle-aged man with a white fringe of hair and a big mole on top of his head sat behind a large desk and smiled at Browning with exaggerated patience.

“Everything we do is completely above board and in line with the regulations of the EPA. We are very careful to follow protocol. Believe me, we have to be. When something goes wrong, we're the first ones everyone looks at. That's okay, we're happy to do it. All the companies I know are doing the same thing. No one is interested in ruining our planet in the name of making a profit.”

“Which is exactly what someone would say if they were ruining the planet in the name of making a profit,” Viv said. “And you ought to have that mole biopsied.”

Peter Browning kept pushing. “You mentioned the EPA, but that's only one regulatory agency. We've talked to the United States Geological Survey—”

“Oh, believe me, we're familiar with USGS,” the oilman said.

Browning smiled. “Excellent. Then you know that they believe that the earthquakes could be caused by the use of injection wells, which are the wells used—”

“I know what injection wells are, young man.”

Peter gave an uncomfortable smile. “Yes, I'm sure—”

“Listen. Here's the truth. Nobody knows for sure what causes the earthquakes. One scientist says one thing, another one says another. Unfortunately, nobody really knows, and nobody even thinks to ask until something has already happened. People want affordable fuel for their cars, they want the cost of living to stay low. This is what we do. We provide that.”

“In the case of NorthStar Elementary—”

“In the case of NorthStar Elementary, a natural disaster occurred and people did what they always do when something horrible happens—they looked for someone to blame.”

“Nobody is blaming—”

“No? Let's just get honest, shall we? You're here with your little pen and pad, your camera going, trying to get a good story for your viewers. Here's the story.” He lifted a folder from the top of his desk and held it up. “I tried to give it to you and you're more interested in creating a sound bite.” He slapped the folder down on top of the desk. “Dorsett Oil and all of our subsidiaries do everything by the book. When the EPA writes a new book, we follow that. We're not interested in being the bad guys, and you're not going to come in here and lay what happened at NorthStar on us. Period. I won't let it happen.”

Browning opened his mouth, then shut it again. He shifted in his seat. The room grew completely silent. The camera shifted a little.

“This is weird,” I said. “I don't remember this on the news.”

“They must have edited it,” Viv said. “This story would have been news in itself.”

Browning looked at his lap, then put his pen and paper on the desk. “We're on the wrong track here,” he said.

The oil man nodded. “Damn straight.”

“How about this? How about if you just tell me what you'd like for the people to know? I know you must feel attacked—”

The oil man laughed.  “Son, I can handle your questions. I'm just not going to let you run me down a road I have no reason to be on.”

Browning lifted his hands. “No, no, of course, I'm not saying—”

“Wow,” I said. “He's backpedaling as hard as he can.”

“Crikey. The lad folded like a house of cards, didn't he?”

“Here is what I'll say,” the oil man said. “We get oil out of the ground. That's what we do. We use the best, most efficient methods we can, and we play by the rules. We respect the rules. The rules are there for a reason. We're playing the short game—getting the resources out for people to use, and staying on the right side of the law—and the long game. Namely, making sure our grandkids and their grandkids get to enjoy this planet like we have.” He sat back and spread his hands. “Now, from time to time the smart guys come along and say that we need to change the rules. We've learned something new. Now everything has to be done like this instead of like that.” He shrugged. “Okay. So we change how we do it. That's the way it's always been done, and that's the way it always will be done.”

“Fair enough.” Browning chewed his bottom lip for just a moment. “Now. Okay. If you don't mind, I would like to ask a question about what you just said.” His head was ducked into his shoulders a bit, and the confident smile of five minutes ago was significantly subdued.

Oil Man nodded sagely.

“You said, from time to time the smart guys come along and say we need to change the rules. Do you believe, based on your years of experience in this industry, that a change in those rules is coming? That it's needed?”

Oil Man shrugged. “I wouldn't be surprised. Maybe, though, it's not our rules that need to be changed. If that earthquake we had would have happened in California, it wouldn't even have made the news.”

“My contact at the USGS said that we either need to eliminate the use of injection wells, or adapt to the effects.”

“Well, we're back to assuming that the injection wells cause the earthquakes, and I think we've established that I'm not even going to slow down and wave to that.”

Peter gave a sickly smile. “But if it's shown there's something to adapt to...”

“If it's shown that there's something to adapt to, of course we will. But in my experience, the regulators don't wait until something's proven. If they decide we need to adapt, they'll let us know.” He grinned widely.

Browning nodded, then turned toward the camera. “Okay, you can cut it now.”

“Okay,” a disembodied voice said. The video ended.

“Was that Jessica?” I asked Viv.

“It sounded like her.”

“Maybe we should talk to her. If she was there during Browning's interviews, she might have some inside information.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know—like, how the mood of the interview was, before it was all edited and put to music. See, I don't remember this interview on television very well, but it seemed like it was pretty straightforward. Two guys talking, congenial. If we could get a handle on how all the interviews actually were, it might point to something.”

“The only thing this one points to is that Peter Browning was a chicken-weasel.” Viv downed the rest of her coffee and scrolled through the remaining links. “It looks like these are all interviews with Baucum. At least, his name is in the title.”

“Here's one about a quake in North Texas.”

The story was fairly short, less than two minutes. A family's newly built dream home was so badly damaged, they were in the process of deciding whether it would be better to repair it or tear it down and start over. Fracking had increased in that area around the same time they signed the contract to build. At the end of the story, Browning wrapped it up from the news desk by reminding everyone of the similar incident in Lubbock. Behind him, a still picture of the collapsed NorthStar Elementary and another one of David Baucum's smiling face sat in the background.

In the next video, Browning went further afield, into Oklahoma and points north. On a map of the United States, red dots radiating pulsing, concentric circles popped up one by one. Pictures spun from off camera and landed on the map. A collapsed roof. A failed highway embankment. A gash in the earth that a crowd of people gathered around.

David Baucum's face spun and landed in the center of all those disasters. 

Viv sighed. “It's no wonder the poor man drank himself to death. Watching all this kind of makes me want to jump off a tall building, and it's not even my fault.”

I shook my head. “I'm still not convinced it's Baucum's fault that this happened. I mean, it was an earthquake. An act of God or, like the man said, a natural disaster.”

I leaned back in my seat. “I can't watch anymore. This is exhausting.” I reached for my purse. “I'm going to go home and cuddle with my dog for a while.”

“You sure you don't need to check in with the hubs first?” Viv asked, fishing my keys from her purse.

“I'll text him that I've survived our first official day of investigation,” I said, taking the keys from her.

She frowned. “I can drive.”

“You have to sneak back in, right? Or else you’ll get grounded again?”

She scowled, but didn’t argue.

I patted her on the arm. “Careful, Viv. Your aura’s looking a bit brownish.”

Back at Trailertopia, Frank and Stump were waiting patiently for me to get home and fix dinner. I stood in front of the fridge for so long that I forgot what I was doing.

I kept thinking about the “gripey” Barbara Hale, who had proclaimed the Baucum name such a disgrace now. I wondered what it would be like to be David Baucum. Growing up in a town where everyone knew your name. Where everyone thinks the best of you and expects the best from you.

It was a far cry from the way I'd grown up. As I'd reflected yesterday, my own personal bar was set pretty low.

And a far cry, of course, from Jacob-the-heel-grabber.

Someone with the Baucum name would be expected to do great things. Be a hero, even.

What would it do to someone like that, to fail so publicly? And then to lose the family business, on top of everything else? The business his war-hero grandfather had started and passed down to him. A fall like that would be difficult for anyone, but when you're falling from an even higher platform...

“Ummm,” Frank said.

I looked up to see him and Stump both looking at me from their spot in the recliner, and realized I'd done nothing but stare at the open fridge for the past several minutes.

“Should I get the peanut butter and jelly?” Frank offered.

I shook my head and laughed. “Sorry, no.”

Frank wasn't trying to be critical. He would honestly be fine with PB&J, and to be honest, it didn't sound half bad to me, either. But I was cold and kind of depressed from the afternoon. I wanted comfort food.

I had grilled chicken, which according to the unrealistically ambitious plan I'd made for myself on grocery shopping day, was to be paired with acorn squash and roasted brussel sprouts. I could not—nor did I want to—imagine the circumstances wherein brussel sprouts would be considered comfort food. 

I pulled the chicken from the fridge, mentally ordered the crisper to keep those veggies crisp for a few more days, and added cheese, butter, tortillas and salsa to the counter.

I toasted the tortillas with the chicken and cheese, slapped them together and cut them into wedges, set a plate full on the coffee table with a bowl of salsa—which I reminded myself was, after all, a vegetable, and collapsed onto the sofa with Stump.

“Hard day?” Frank asked. This, for Frank, was the very height of sympathy and concern.

I shrugged. “I think the universe is telling me I suck.”

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Chapter Seven