I knew my mother was finally feeling better because she wanted me to come over the next Saturday and help her “tidy up,” as she put it.
Her real purpose?
Getting my junk out of the basement because my dad wanted to renovate the place as a man cave.
My parents had threatened for months that they would dump the stuff if I didn’t help them go through it. Although I wasn’t looking forward to the work, I was happy to escape my house.
It was sunny and unseasonably warm, the kind of day that teased an early spring. On the drive out, I caught snatches of the sun flashing off the lake through the still-bare trees that hugged the shore.
Upon entering from the garage and stepping into the expansive kitchen, the first sensation to hit me was the overpowering smell of bleach. My mother had been cleaning up a storm since her recovery from the flu, wiping down every surface that could harbor the dreaded sickness.
The basement door next to the fridge was open, so I headed downstairs.
The tableau which greeted me was that of mildly organized chaos. Open boxes of paraphernalia were scattered over the floor, tables, and a battered old green couch.
“Hey there,” she said, turning from pulling a box from a corner. She straightened, took a deep breath, and put her hands on her hips. A light sheen of perspiration hung on her face and wisps of her short brown hair clung to her neck. “Let’s get to it, shall we?”
“Looks like you’ve already gotten a good head start.” I took off my hoodie and threw it on a rickety old kitchen chair.
“No, I mean this Brock fellow. Tell me all about him.”
I dug into the boxes and relayed to her the information I knew about Brock: a year older than me, originally from a neighboring county, had some military background.
“I don’t know much more,” I said as I threw wads of my old clothes in a pile destined for charity. “The one date we had didn’t turn out to be a date at all.”
“Do you plan to make it up?”
“No plans yet.”
The yet part of that sentence pleased me.
Being in the basement for any amount of time made me nostalgic.
It was a walk-out type, which provided quick access to the sprawling back yard and the lake beyond. That green couch had been around as long as I could remember; I used to crash on it after coming in from long languid days in the water.
The old fridge against the wall at the bottom of the stairs still purred and was used to keep extra food items that didn’t fit upstairs. My parents had stocked it with soft drinks, juices, and popsicles when I was growing up and my friends and I used the basement as an unfinished playroom.
If we had been in the lake, my mother made us come through the basement so as not to track water throughout the house. After being outside in the steamy summer and still damp from frolicking in the water, the basement air would hit exposed skin like a cold knife. My mother left clean beach towels for us in a neat stack on small table near the sliding glass doors. I hated tip-toeing across that cold concrete floor to the stairs after drying off, hopping from rug to rug to avoid the chill under my feet.
We fell into conversation about her recovery from flu, Lester’s arrest and—at last—the appointment of a special judge in the lawsuit that was still pending against me.
The order of appointment had arrived the day after Lester’s arrest. Craig Circuit Judge McDowell had been assigned to the case, the order signed by Justice Helen Nolan acting on behalf of the chief justice. At least Judge McDowell was nearby so he wouldn’t have a long drive. Although we both knew the name, Grace and I hadn’t heard anything bad about him.
“I’m hoping the case will be resolved soon,” I said as I picked through a box containing high school notebooks and papers. I flipped through the items, mostly class notes, and threw them into a discard box after failing to remember why I wanted to keep my scratchings about world history or old calculus problems.
“Sounds like you want the job now. What’s changed?”
“I’m not sure that anything has changed. It’s more a question of getting fed up with being in limbo.”
“Have you given up on going back to work with Lillian?”
“I haven’t thought about it for a while. And there is actually no job offer.”
“I don’t understand. You were pretty confident that the new boss would want you to come back.” My mother wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. She picked up a box and moved it near the sliding glass doors where we piled items to be dumped.
“He does,” I said, throwing the last of my high school notebooks into the discard box. “But it seems the powers that be wanted to wait.”
“Wait? Why?”
“Because of the mess with Dirk.”
“Because of—wait—they think you had something to do with—” my mother started, and her face began to get red.
“I don’t know exactly what they’re thinking,” I snapped. “The new boss, Henry, was livid about it.”
“Greer, if those people treat you that way, why in the world would you want to go back and work for them? It’s not like you’re some unknown quantity. They know you. You worked there for years.”
“Well, all the members aren’t the same—”
“But most of them are, right?”
I grudgingly admitted she was correct. “But why should I stay around here, when people are trying to keep me out of office?”
My mother took a seat on the bottom step of the flight of stairs into the kitchen. “Greer, that’s just a handful of cranks.”
“It doesn’t feel like that.”
“Greer, you got almost sixty percent of the vote. You told me yourself you’d heard some folks call it a landslide. Voters wanted you, not Dirk, as clerk. Those people took the time to write out your name. What happened last summer with you saving Judge Winslow—”
“Mom, that wasn’t—”
She stood up and actually stomped her foot.
“I will not hear you protest against that truth again. You got shot defending him—saving his life most likely, and people around here understand that. You’ve tried to distance yourself from what you did that day. You’ve tried to deny that act of courage. But the people of this county didn’t let you. They trust you. Which is more than I can say for that bunch Lillian and Henry work for.”
“But I wish they’d figure out what happened to Dirk—and Ivan. There’s always going to be a cloud over me if they don’t figure out who did it.”
“Don’t you think Ivan killed Dirk?”
“If that’s the case, who killed Ivan?”
“What about that other man, the one who was arrested with Lester? Your dad told me you had prosecuted him.”
“I guess it could be him. I think most people want it to be him, just to have the everything resolved.”
“He seems like the ideal suspect, if you ask me.”
She was trying to reason through the situation, but my mother’s tone was not at all convincing.
And a flicker of unease in my stomach told me I wasn’t convinced, either.
I took several boxes from the basement upon my mother’s insistence, including boxes of stuff that didn’t even belong to me, such as towels and kitchen items my mother believed I needed. But my grandmother had left me a nicely-equipped kitchen; I lacked for nothing when it came to the basics. I would have to take the extra items foisted upon me to a local charity drop off, and not breathe a word of it to my mother. It was easier to dump it and hope she never missed the junk when she was at my house.
By the time I arrived home it was late afternoon. I was achy and looking forward to a quiet evening spent on the couch to catch up on some reading. I collected the mail that had spilled through the front door slot and onto the hardwood floor in the front hall.
One item jumped out—it was a catalog addressed to my deceased grandmother. Despite the fact that she had been dead for well over three years, items addressed to her still occasionally found their way to me. My father had taken steps to get her name off mailing lists, which reduced but did not completely stem the tide of unwanted mailings.
As I turned the piece of mail over in my hands and puzzled at how my grandmother ever got on a mailing list for a fly-fishing catalog, the image of Brock delivering that large white envelope to Sophie flashed in my mind.
If getting pieces of mail addressed to my grandmother still made me wistful, I could only imagine how Sophie felt in taking that envelope from Brock.
I went into the kitchen, tossed the bills on the table, and flung the catalog into the trash by the door. As I wondered whether I should call Sophie to ask about the next step in the election lawsuit, my cell phone rang.
My cousin was demanding my attention.
“I heard about Mr. Logan’s escapades down there. When were you going to fill me in?”
For the next fifteen minutes, I regaled Lillian with my version of what had occurred the evening of my date and told her about Lester’s unfortunate encounter with a former client in a jail cell.
“Hey, I heard that the election results were finally going to be certified,” she finally said.
“That’s true, but I’m still a long way from being clerk—or coming back to work with you, for that matter.”
“We’d better not talk about that last part. I’ll get mad. I can’t believe the GRC is stringing you along. In any event, the real purpose of this call is to tell you that Henry and I will be down in your neck of the woods next week to interview witnesses.”
“Bet I can guess what—or rather who—brings you down here.”
“I’ll tell you because we will need to talk to some people in the clerk’s office. Lester, of course, is the main thing that brings us back to you, but we’re also investigating Pete Claiborne. He’s looking at a suspension for not reporting Lester’s thefts.”
Lillian and I made tentative plans to meet the next week. I also told her that I would let Grace know that they were coming, pointing out the fact that Grace was the boss.
“But maybe not the boss for too much longer?” she asked hopefully.
“I have no idea how long it will take for the new judge to rule.”
“I hope you get to come back and work here.”
I had expected her to say that at some point during our conversation, and for her to expect my agreement with it.
But I couldn’t agree.
Granted, it would be a job. But things were looking brighter in my hometown, lawsuit or not.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” was the most honest response I could muster.
I decided to change the subject by asking her to satisfy my curiosity about whether there had been any complaints or claims filed against Hunter Hood and described the envelope I had seen delivered to Sophie in the clerk’s office.
“Sounds like a reimbursement claim against him—well, his estate. Judge Winslow called here and told us about that death the day after it happened. Since we knew he was dead, we wouldn’t have sent out any more bar complaints.”
“Did Hunter have many?”
“No. I think the only file we had open on him at his time of death was from a client demanding a refund on a divorce case which had already been completed. We sent that back out to his estate after he died.” Lillian’s description sounded like the claim Sophie had mentioned to me.
We talked about when she and Henry would be down, and what we might be able to do during a short visit, which was probably not a lot during the winter. We might be able to get out to the lodge for a meal at most. Yet I was pleased to know that I would be seeing them again soon, even if the purpose of the trip was primarily business.
After ending the call, I checked the clock and noticed it was later than I thought. When I bent over to scratch my ankle, my car alarm went off.
Cursing, I patted my pockets looking for the fob.
But my fob wasn’t there.
I launched myself off the couch and made for the garage. I flung open the door from the kitchen to the garage and was immediately hit with a blast of cold air from the winter night.
By the scant light of the streetlamps, I could see that the garage door was up.
And the back window of my car shattered.