CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Ford

I wanted to tell them to get out. I wanted to tell Noble that I’d never liked him, that he’d always been my enemy, and that I was done with that part of my life, so he could get into his rusted-out old Chrysler and leave. I wanted to tell my father to get out, too. He was nothing to me.

But I couldn’t do it. Even though I knew what they wanted from me, I still couldn’t kick them out.

I could tell myself I was being heroic in allowing them to stay, but the truth was, I was curious about my father, and I…well, I had kind of missed Noble. Maybe it was because I was getting older, or because I no longer had Pat’s family as mine, but in the last couple of years I’d been thinking of visiting my relatives again. Then I would remember that, “You won’t remember this…” crap and cancel the plans I’d been making.

So now here was this man I’d only seen in pictures and the cousin I’d spent my childhood being tortured by, and I knew they needed a place to stay. No one had told me my father was going to be released years before the end of his sentence (Good behavior? Got a Ph.D. in entomology?) but Noble’s eldest daughter had e-mailed me about what her father had done. Vanessa had been furious and ready to disown her father, but, to tell the truth, the story had made me laugh. Uncle Zeb had married some girl a third his age, then left the poor thing to cry in loneliness. Vanessa told me her dad had just been released from the local hoosegow where he’d been thrown for thirty days for threatening to shoot some man’s eternally-barking dog. Noble might not have received jail if he hadn’t been caught inside the man’s alarmed fence, loaded shotgun aimed. Worse, Noble’d had to be wrestled to the ground to keep him from shooting the dog after the sheriff arrived. He said that if he was going to be sent to jail anyway, he wanted it to be for an actual crime, not for something he’d just thought about doing.

So, anyway, Noble had been in jail for thirty days, and presumably celibate during that time, then he’d been confronted with a nubile and extremely neglected young wife. Vanessa was saying she never wanted to see her father again, but it all didn’t seem too bad to me.

It was my guess that Noble had found out that my father was being released from prison, kept the knowledge to himself, and on his way out of town, had picked the old man up. So now they were here, two ex-cons, with no job, no cash, and no place to stay.

Oh, yeah, I knew what they wanted. I was sure Noble wanted a grubstake and the second I gave him money enough to open some business somewhere, he’d be off. And he’d leave the old man with me.

So what would I do with a geriatric gnome?

I didn’t get any further in my thoughts because Jackie knocked on the door, and when I told her to come in, right away, I saw that she wanted something from me. Let’s see. What could it be?

When she started to speak, I wanted to tell her to spare me the lecture, that I’d just get out my checkbook. I’d buy Noble some business far away from the angry relatives (if I knew them, only the younger generation was angry; Uncle Clyde’s generation was probably laughing their heads off) and I’d send the old man to a nursing home.

But as soon as I saw Jackie’s face, I decided to use her guilt to get her to tell me why she’d been so weird lately. First, though, I had to listen to what she was saying about family. She was saying how everyone needed one and how as a person got older, family meant more to him, and someday I’d regret not getting to know my father, and I should let bygones be bygones and—

I’d seen my father sitting upright, eyes wide open, but sound asleep. After he’d unnecessarily told me who he was and before Jackie made her dramatic wet-dog entrance, Tessa had asked him how he could do that. He said that where he’d been he’d learned that he had to look as though he were alert at all times. He said that a man with his fine physical looks couldn’t let down his guard ever. Tessa had giggled because she thought he was joking about his “fine physical looks,” but I could see that he was serious.

While Jackie was going on at me about family, I tried to see if I’d inherited this ability to sleep with my eyes open while sitting up. When I’d about decided I was going to be able to do it, Jackie stopped talking and looked down at her hands. Uh oh, I thought. She’d gone off family and was on to something else, but I hadn’t been listening. I searched my mind to remember what she’d been saying. Oh, yes. Camera. Something about a camera. Her new digital maybe? Or that fantastic little printer she’d bought?

“Where’d you get it?” I asked. That seemed a safe question.

“I…” she began. “I met this man and he lent me—”

She couldn’t have woken me up more completely if she’d shot at me. “A man?” I asked.

“You…” She looked hard at me. “He doesn’t want me to tell you about him because he said you’d tell Dessie. But I think you’re a better person than that. You are a better person than that, aren’t you?”

“Much better,” I said. I saw no need to tell Jackie that Dessie’s mad passion for me had only been an attempt to make her jug-eared lawn boy jealous.

Instantly, Jackie gave me so much information that I had trouble understanding it all. Of course my hearing may have been clogged by the fact that my temperature had risen approximately twelve and a half degrees. What kind of town was this? I’m a rich bachelor. Where were the women who were dying to have me? Women who would do anything to get me? Dessie wanted some kid who only knew how to push a lawn mower, and now Jackie had—my temperature went up two degrees more—“met a man.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, “let’s backtrack. His name is—?”

“Russell Dunne.”

“And he is—?”

“An associate professor of art history at the University of North Carolina.”

“Right. And he gave you—?”

“Lent me the digital camera and the printer. They’re his, not mine. At the picnic he took a photo, printed it out, and I thought it was—”

“The printer isn’t battery-operated so how’d he use it out in the woods?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he had a battery pack. He had so much stuff in his bag it was almost magic.”

I think she was trying to make me laugh, but laughter was the furthest thing from my mind. “Magic,” I said.

“If you’re going to be nasty, I’m not going to tell you anything.”

I apologized, but I was dying to ask her to spell the guy’s name. When I searched out his credentials on the Internet I wanted to be sure I had the name right.

I listened politely as she told me how “nice” he was, but my mind was racing. She had to have met him on Sunday. While I was at Dessie’s, solving her love life and being a great friend to a woman I hardly knew, Jackie had been picking up men…Where?

“Where did you meet him?” I asked. “Exactly where?” I added, in case she’d already told me.

She waved her hand. “That doesn’t matter. I’d been taking photos of flowers and—”

“You picked up a man on a trail somewhere?” I asked, truly shocked. “I didn’t think you were that kind of woman. But then, you’re not from my generation, are you?”

Jackie didn’t take my bait. “He grew up in Cole Creek, but he—” She looked down at her hands. “He asked me not to tell you about him because of your relationship with Dessie.”

Again with Dessie. Was I tied forever to her because I’d had dinner with her? First Rebecca and now Dessie. “What’s Dessie got to do with this?” I asked more sharply than I’d intended to.

“Russell wrote a bad review of her work and since then the town has considered him a pariah.”

That took me so aback I couldn’t prevent a smile. What an old-fashioned word. “A pariah, huh?” I stopped smiling. This thing needed some logic applied to it. “Why would the town care whether or not Dessie Mason gets good reviews?”

“She’s the town celebrity so they don’t want her hurt.”

“Really? It’s my opinion that this town pays no attention to celebrities. Take me, for example. In that town where I met you, they were all over me, but here, we’ve had one invitation to an afternoon in the park and since then, zilch.”

“What does that mean?” Jackie asked, frowning.

“Just that something isn’t ringing true.” I could see she was getting angry, so I smiled to soften what I wanted to say. “Are you sure this guy didn’t ask you not to tell me about him because I might stop him from getting what he wants?”

Jackie narrowed her eyes at me. “And just what is it that you think he wants?”

“You. In bed.”

“Is that supposed to shock me? You just said that I’m from a different generation than you are. Women today aren’t eternally-virgin Doris Days. I hope he wants me in bed. I really, really, hope he does. But, so far, no luck.”

I didn’t want Jackie to see my shock. Or was it shock? Was it, maybe, red-hot jealousy?

“Let’s not fight, okay?” she said softly. “I really came up here to talk to you about your relatives. They don’t have any place to stay.”

Sorry, but I couldn’t move my mind around that quickly. Some man had written a bad review of Dessie Mason’s work and now an entire town hated him for it? Did that include Miss Essie Lee? She was as dried-up as Dessie was luscious, and human nature told me that the Miss Essie Lees of the world did not defend the Dessies.

I wanted to ask Jackie more questions about this man. Top of my list was to ask for his social security number so I could run a major search on him. But when I looked at Jackie, I could tell that she’d just asked me a question. Ah, yes. Toodles. My dear old dad.

“You didn’t put it in your book,” Jackie said.

That startled me. Had I ever had a thought that I hadn’t put in one of my books? She spoke again. Oh, yes, why had my dad been in prison? True, that particular story had not been put into any book. I had, of course, written the story, but that manuscript had been a thousand pages long, so Pat had done some cutting. She said it was better to leave out the reason the hero’s father was in prison because the missing story lent some mystery to the book. She didn’t say that I was revealing too much, but then Pat could sometimes be as polite as her mother.

“When he was a baby,” I said, “my father was dropped on his head and afterward, he was always slow. Not retarded, but…” I thought. “Simple. Childlike. My mother told me he took everything literally.”

I settled back in my chair. I’d told this story only once before, and that was to Pat. Right now, part of me didn’t want to accord Jackie the honor of being the second person to hear it. After all, while I’d been patching up someone’s broken romance, Jackie had been picking up a strange man in a forest, believing every word he said, and lusting over him. I couldn’t make myself think about what she’d said, that she wanted to go to bed with this stranger. Had I misjudged her character? Was she after all men? Would Noble have to fend her off? My funny-looking father?

I made a vow to never again eat black olives that had been sliced into little rings.

“My uncles,” I said, “decided to rob a bank. They were all young and full of themselves and they saw it as a way to make themselves rich. Of course they didn’t think how they were later going to explain the fact that even though half of them were unemployed, they could suddenly afford houses and cars. But anyway, they came up with what they thought was a foolproof plan:They’d use Toodles as a decoy. He—”

“Why’s he called ‘Toodles’?”

I looked at her. “I’ll tell you the details if you want to hear them, but it might be better just to say that one of the results of my father’s injury was a very long delay in toilet training.”

“Oh,” Jackie said. “So how were your uncles going to use a poor, innocent man like your father to help them commit a crime?”

“Tootles was to sit outside the bank with the motor running in the getaway car, thinking he was going to drive away when they came running out. But my uncles double-crossed him. They planned to rob the bank, then go out the backdoor where another car was waiting. They figured that by the time the police came, they’d be long gone. When the police stopped to arrest Toodles, that would give them time to escape.”

“They wanted your father to be arrested?”

“Yes. As a diversion. They knew Toodles hadn’t done anything wrong, so what could the police charge him with? Sitting outside the bank in a car with the engine running? My uncles figured the police would let him go after a few hours, then the lot of them would share the money and live happily ever after.”

“And the police wouldn’t search for the bank robbers? Wouldn’t they suspect your uncles?” Jackie asked, eyes wide.

“The police could find them for all they cared, because my uncles believed they had ironclad alibis: each other. Who could fight eleven men swearing that they’d all been together?”

“Okay, so what went wrong?”

“My uncles didn’t know that Toodles had been seeing a girl.”

“Your mother.”

“Yes. She’d been raised in an orphanage and she was pretty much alone in the world. And she had such a bad temper that she didn’t have a lot of dates, plus she was past thirty, so maybe when little Toodles came along, she was ready to try anything.” I shrugged. Who knew what went on in my mother’s head? The woman had certainly never shared any of her inner feelings with me.

“Anyway, my uncles didn’t know that the night before the robbery, my parents had crossed the state line and been married by a justice of the peace. Three days before, my mother had told Toodles she was going to have me. I believe her exact words were, ‘Look what you did to me, you little cretin.’ But, as I said, my father doesn’t seem to see things as other people do, so he was very happy that his girlfriend was going to have his baby, and he asked her to marry him. One of my aunts told me that my mother said she’d rather let a train run over her feet than marry him, but then my father told her he was going to buy her a house and a car and that she’d never again have to milk a cow.”

“He was under a bit of pressure, wasn’t he?” Jackie said. “He had a wife, a child on the way, and no way to provide for his new family. So there he was, sitting in the car waiting for his brothers to show up with the loot, but, instead, the police arrived. He must have been frantic.”

“Yeah. By the time the police arrived, my uncles had already run out the backdoor, but my father didn’t know that. And what my brothers didn’t know is that Toodles had a gun. They never did find out where he got it, but between you and me, I think my mother gave it to him. She told the police she didn’t know anything, but I think my dad had told her about the bank job. My mother wasn’t one for taking someone’s word for anything, so if Toodles told her he was going to buy her a house and a car, she’d want to know where he was going to get the money. I think Toodles told her what he and his brothers were going to do, and I think my mother had some suspicions about his brothers, so she gave him an old revolver she’d got from somewhere. She was going to see that she got what she wanted.”

Jackie gave me one of “those” looks. “And what she wanted was a home for her child.” When I didn’t say anything to that, she said, “Did your father shoot someone?”

“Three people, two of them policemen. When the police went charging into the bank, guns drawn, Toodles thought his beloved brothers were still inside, so he went in shooting.”

“In other words, your father risked his life to save his no-good, lying, double-crossing, rat fink brothers.”

“That’s the way my mother saw it, too. Toodles didn’t kill anyone, but he wounded the two policemen and grazed a hysterical bank teller. Took off her left earlobe.”

Jackie leaned back in the chair. “So your father went to jail, and after you were born, your mother gave you to your uncles to raise.” Her head came up. “What happened to the money from the bank job?”

I smiled. “They didn’t get a dime. One of the tellers, not the one who got shot, but another one, recognized my uncle Cal’s voice and called out his name. They all panicked and ran out the backdoor.”

Jackie got up and walked over to one of the bookcases along the wall. I knew she wasn’t looking at the books, but was thinking about my family. They did that to people. Hadn’t that been proven when people bought the books I’d written about them?

I decided to change the subject. “Had any visions lately?” My intention was purely malicious. I wanted her to remember the fun she and I’d had when I’d been around to save the lives of the people she saw. Would this Russell Dunne have done that? Or would he have hesitated and told her that she’d just had a dream? Or would he have taken her to a doctor to be examined?

Jackie took a long time before she answered. “What would happen if I started seeing evil inside a person’s head?”

Wow! Where had that come from? And what an intriguing question. It was one of those questions that could inspire an entire novel.

I started to answer, but then I sat upright. Was this question from the guy she’d picked up in the forest? If it was, then that meant Jackie had told him about her visions. Having sex with someone else was one thing, but this…this sharing of what was private between her and me was betrayal. When I didn’t—couldn’t—say a word, she kept on talking. It was a good thing her back was to me because if she’d seen my face, she would have run from the room.

“What if we were having dinner with two couples and I had a vision that one man and one woman, not married to each other, were having an affair and were going to kill her husband and his wife? How would you—or I—stop it?”

I liked the way that question made my mind work so I put aside Jackie’s betrayal and thought about it. “Warn the victims,” I said.

She turned to look at me. “Oh, yeah, sure, and people believe that their spouse is going to kill them. Don’t you think that if a man was plotting to kill his wife that he’d be really nice to her? And he’d make sure that others saw how much he loved her, and that she was the most important person in his life? If you told her this darling man was going to kill her, she’d never believe you.”

“You’ve done some thinking about this, haven’t you?”

“Yeah,” she said, plopping down onto the chair across from my desk. She hit the seat so hard that if it hadn’t been padded, she would have broken her tailbone. “I, uh…I think I know why Amarisa was killed.”

If someone had held a gun to my head, I wouldn’t have let her know that I’d never heard the name “Amarisa” before, although it took only about a second to figure out who she was.

“Why was she killed?” I asked in a whisper and couldn’t help a glance at the door. Please don’t let anyone knock and disturb us.

“She had visions. At first they were like mine, but, gradually, they got stronger until she began to see what was inside people’s heads. And she started to…to prevent the evil from happening.”

Prevent, I thought. Was she hinting that this woman, Amarisa, murdered people before they did what they were just thinking about doing? But how could she be sure they were going to carry through? Didn’t everyone at some time think of killing someone else? “This Russell Dunne tell you about her?” I asked, and hated the jealousy that was in my voice.

“Yes. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but—”

“Why shouldn’t you tell me?” I snapped. When had I become the enemy? The outsider?

Jackie shrugged. “I don’t know. Russell was telling me these things in confidence, but maybe if this story were brought out in the open, people would tell what they know. Maybe then this evil wouldn’t hang over Cole Creek.”

“I can’t think of anything it would solve if this story were made public,” I said firmly, my jaw rigid.

Jackie looked at me. “Do you think the people who killed that woman are still alive?”

“No.”

“What makes you say that?”

It was my turn to reveal secrets. “I looked up some of the people from this town on the Internet. Several people died in freak accidents the year after the woman was crushed.”

“How freaky?” she asked.

“You ready for this? Crushed. In one way or another, they were all crushed.”

“So who did it?”

“That’s just what I wondered. Think Russell would know?” I was being facetious, so I expected Jackie to rein me in as she usually did, but, instead, she got up and walked back to the bookcase.

“I think he probably knows a lot more about this than he’s told me. It changed his life—just as it did mine. I really think that…that…”

“Your mother was one of the people who put rocks on…Amarisa?” The name sounded strange, but it fit her. Part of me wanted to show Jackie the photo of the woman’s reconstructed face, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. First of all, I was sure that Jackie would see the resemblance to herself. And I was just as sure that she’d remember the woman. She remembered everything else in town, so why not her own relative? I’d heard that we never forget traumatic events in our lives, so I doubted if Jackie could look at that photo and not recall what she’d seen.

But I couldn’t get past my hurt. I’d been honest with Jackie since the day I met her. I’d told her everything about my life. Well, okay, actually, I’d written my life story, sold it, and made a lot of money off it, but still, Jackie knew all about me. Maybe it was true that I’d not told her much about my dinner with Dessie, but then I’d not found out anything that I could share with Jackie. Except about the sculptures in Dessie’s locked cupboard. And the fact that I thought one of the women in the sculpture was Jackie’s mother. But still, I wasn’t hiding anything as big as what Jackie was keeping from me. Except maybe the photo in the FedEx envelope.

“Jackie,” I said softly, “if you had another vision, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you? Me. Not someone you hardly know.”

When she looked at me, she seemed to be trying to decide whether or not to answer me. And whether or not she should tell me first—or him.

What had this man done to win her loyalty so completely? I wondered. She couldn’t have spent too much time with him because she’d been with me nearly every minute for the last few days. Yet she was contemplating telling him and not me about something that I’d come to think of as a secret between us.

“Yeah, I’ll tell you,” she said after a while, and gave me a small smile. “But what do I do if—”

“You see evil inside a person’s head?” I had no idea. That was a question that would take a philosopher a lifetime to answer. I wanted to lighten the mood between us. “Look into my eyes and tell me what I’m thinking about Russell Dunne,” I said, leaning across the desk and staring at her hard.

“That you want him to move in here with us, along with your father and cousin,” she said instantly, without a hint of a smile.

Groaning, I leaned back in my chair. “Very funny. You should have been a comedian.”

“I have to be around this house. What are we going to do with your family?”

“Why don’t we ask Russell?” I said.

“Before or after we ask Dessie?”

I clamped my mouth closed before I let it out of the bag that there was nothing between Dessie and me. Right now I wished I’d not been such a great guy and smoothed things out between Dessie and her young boyfriend. I should have grabbed Dessie in front of the windows and kissed her. At least now I’d have a girlfriend to balance out Jackie’s boyfriend.

I forced myself not to ask Jackie if she could repair her last wedding dress, and instead said that my father and Noble absolutely, positively could not, under any circumstances in the world, live in this house with me. As I hoped it would, that set Jackie off and took her mind off Russell Dunne. I got to practice my sleeping-while-sitting-up-with-my-eyes-wide-open again, and was on the verge of mastering it, when a delightful smell wafted up through the old floorboards. “What’s that?” I asked and knew by Jackie’s sly look that she was up to something.

“Did you know that your cousin can bake?”

I just blinked at that. It was certainly my day for shocks. If Jackie had said that Noble was secretly Spiderman I couldn’t have been more surprised.

“It smells like he’s taken something out of the oven. Shall we go down and sample the wares?”

I wanted to be aloof. I wanted to tell Jackie that I had work to do and couldn’t be bothered with something as lowly as doughnuts. Or cinnamon rolls. Or whatever was making that divine smell.

But I followed her like a dog on a leash all the way down to the kitchen. The table in the middle of the room was loaded with baked goods, and from the sheer quantity of it all, it wasn’t difficult to figure out where Noble got his training. I was sure he was used to cooking for many men at a time, maybe a whole jail full of them.

Toodles and Tessa were already seated at the table, both of them with big glasses of milk and wearing white mustaches. Once again, my jealousy flared. First some stranger takes away the loyalty of my assistant, and now my own father was taking away my sidekick.

As Noble dumped a bunch of fat, and extremely sticky, cinnamon buns onto a plate about four inches below my nose, he punched my shoulder and said, “It looks like it’s just you and me.”

The real trouble with relatives is that they know you too well. If you’ve grown up with them, they knew you when you were too young to have developed disguises. Maybe I could hide my feelings from Jackie, who hadn’t known me very long, but I couldn’t hide anything from Noble. He knew that I was jealous as I watched my former buddy, Tessa, practically sitting on my father’s lap.

Once I’d eaten one or two of Noble’s baked goods—certainly not enough to warrant Jackie’s remarks about Henry the Eighth being alive and well—I decided to keep my mouth shut and think about things for a while. I needed to see what was going on around me and make some decisions. And, no, I wasn’t “sulking” as Jackie said I was.

I got a book, stretched out in the hammock in the garden, and watched the lot of them as they interacted. Okay, so what I really wanted was a reason to send my father to an old-age home, and to tell Noble that he definitely had to make his own way in life. I’d willingly given Noble’s kids a start in life, but I didn’t owe anything to my cousin.

But, oh, hell, why did it all have to be so damned pleasant?

It seemed that my father had a thousand ways to sit in one place and occupy himself. I watched with fascination while he showed Tessa how to weave a cat’s cradle with a loop of string. I’d seen that done in books but not in real life. With a twist of his wrists, he could make a swing dangle from the loop, then he’d twist again and make a rowboat.

What really fascinated me was when he said that my mother used to send him books that showed him how to do things. I knew my mother had never visited my father in prison. In fact, she didn’t go to the trial, or, to my knowledge, had she ever seen him after their wedding night. To say that she’d discouraged me from wanting to visit him was an understatement. Pat had tried to get me to visit my father, but I hadn’t even bothered to answer her.

But I heard Toodles say that his wife—and he said the name with great affection—had sent him how-to books, so he’d learned to do a lot of really interesting things. “She sent him kids’ books,” Noble said softly when he saw me staring. “Get him to do some magic tricks.”

I looked down at my book and pretended I wasn’t observing the lot of them.

Noble had always been one of those really useful men. From an early age, he’d taken to tools the way I’d taken to words. As pre-schoolers, I’d imagined things and he’d built them.

First, Noble tore into the grapevines that had overgrown a rotting covered seat. Within minutes, he’d pruned the vines in what I was sure was a professional manner. Nate was there and he stood back in awe. “Where’d you learn to do that?”

“Worked for a landscape company for a few years,” Noble said as he wiggled the old wood that supported the vines.

“I’ll help you tear it out,” Nate said, but Noble stopped him.

“There’s good in it yet. You got any wood around here, something I could use to repair this?”

“Sure,” Nate said. “There’s a pile of boards behind Jackie’s house.”

“Jackie’s house” turned out to be her studio. Looking over my book, I watched as Nate and Noble disappeared behind the studio to look for wood that I didn’t know was there. Meanwhile, my jealousy flared up again when I saw my father disappear into the tunnel that led into Tessa’s “secret” house. It wasn’t very secret if she let everyone in the neighborhood in, was it?

Minutes later, Jackie came out of the kitchen with a tray holding tall glasses of lemonade and more things that Noble had baked, this time savory, topped with cheese, onions, and rings of black olives. She handed me a plateful, and I had begun picking the olives off the third one when I heard a loud whoop that almost made me drop everything.

Noble came out from behind the studio holding a big black portfolio and flipping through what looked to be photographs. “These are great!” he was saying, looking at Jackie. “These are the best pictures I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Jackie told Noble he had no right to look at something that she considered private.

But Noble rattled off some long story about how he’d “accidently” opened a window in her studio when he’d picked up a board, then “accidently” dropped the board inside. When he’d climbed through the window to get the board, he’d “accidently” knocked the portfolio down and “accidently” seen the pictures. Two seconds after he finished this B.S., Jackie was asking him for praise. Begging for it.

Noble couldn’t stop himself from glancing at me, and under his skin, darkened from years in the sun, I saw a blush. We both knew he was lying. How many windows had Noble and I climbed through when we were kids? Between my rampant curiosity and his inclination toward criminality, no one in our family could hide anything.

Nate called to Toodles and Tessa to come out of the house that I had heretofore thought was mine and Tessa’s, to look at the pictures and have some food. I stayed in my hammock, the book in front of my face, as the lot of them oohed and aahed over photographs that Jackie hadn’t shown me. Were they of Russell Dunne? I wondered.

But after a while Toodles held one up beside Tessa, facing me, and I saw a knockout picture of the kid. I was several feet away, but even at that distance I could see that it was good. Jackie had shown Tessa as she really was: not a cute kid, but one who lived on another plane than the rest of us live on.

After the lot of them had run out of words to praise the photos, Jackie took the pictures out of everyone’s hands, put them back into the portfolio and brought them over to me. Pulling up a chair beside the hammock, she handed me the portfolio as though it were an offering.

With great solemnity, I took it from her, and went through the photos one by one. Man, oh, man, were they good! I was really and truly and deeply impressed.

Even though I’m a writer, I couldn’t think of anything adequate to say to convey what I thought of those pictures. I knew Tessa so I could tell how perfectly Jackie had captured her, but even if I hadn’t known her, I could have written an essay about the child.

Closing the portfolio, I tried to think of how to tell Jackie what I thought. But there were no words in any language to explain how amazed I was. So I turned and pressed my lips to hers; it was the only thing that seemed appropriate.

However, what was meant to be a kiss to tell her that I thought her pictures were fabulous, turned into something more. I didn’t touch her except with my lips, but for a moment I thought I heard bells ringing. Or maybe it was stars tinkling like little silver bells. When I pulled away, I looked at her in shock. It was one more shock in a day that could have put an earthquake to shame. And she seemed to be feeling the same way because she just sat there staring at me with her eyes wide.

“I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m hungry,” Noble said, and broke the spell that was on Jackie and me.

Turning, I looked at the four of them standing there, and had to blink a couple of times to clear my vision. Noble had an I-told-you-so expression on his face and Nate looked embarrassed. Tessa was frowning, while Toodles was looking at me, well, kind of fondly, like a father might look at his son. I turned away and studied the façade of Jackie’s studio.

A minute later, everyone was back to normal, except that I thought I’d had enough of lying in the hammock and watching, so I got up and, after we’d eaten all of Noble’s cheese-things, I helped him put that old frame over the broken seat back together. I got out Pat’s father’s toolbox and we used the tools. Noble didn’t comment when he first saw the tools, but when he got one dirty, he apologized. I said it was okay, and a minute later, he mumbled, “Sorry about your wife.”

I didn’t say anything, but his words meant a lot to me. They were of sympathy, yes, but the words also showed that he’d been interested enough to learn about the contents of my books.

In the late afternoon, Nate went home, and when Allie came to pick up Tessa, I thought Toodles was going to cry. Allie kept looking at Toodles, trying not to, but he was indeed an odd-looking little man. Since Toodles and Tessa were holding hands and looking at Allie as though she were an evil social worker about to take Tessa away from her beloved grandfather, Jackie asked if Tessa could have a sleep-over.

Allie said, “You mean I could have an evening to myself? Take a long, hot bath? Watch a movie on TV that has sex in it? Drink wine? Naw, I don’t deserve such happiness.” She practically ran through the garden gate before anyone changed his mind.

Eventually, Noble and Jackie went into the kitchen to fix dinner, while Toodles, Tessa, and I stayed outside. Tessa ran around chasing fireflies while I sat on a chair next to my dad.

What a strange thought: my dad. All my life he’d been nothing but a head in group photo shots. I don’t think there was one picture of him alone. And none of my uncles spoke about him. It was hard to believe in a family like mine, but I think they felt guilty. At least one good thing had come of my dad’s incarceration: My uncles never again intentionally committed a crime. Sober and planned, that is.

Toodles and I didn’t say much. Actually, we didn’t say anything. Me, the wordsmith, had not one word in my head that I could think of to say. So tell me, Dad, what was it like to spend forty-three years in prison? Do you hate your brothers? Or maybe I should have asked if he had any of my favorite June bugs on his vest.

When Jackie called us in to dinner, Tessa ran into the kitchen. It was late and we were all hungry. I let my father go ahead of me into the house, but in the doorway, he paused. He didn’t look at me, but stared at the sight of Noble and Jackie loading the table with food.

“You’ll have me?” he asked in that thick accent that I hadn’t heard in years.

For a moment it was as though the earth stood still. Even the fireflies seemed to pause as they waited for my answer.

What could I say? As Jackie had pointed out, the man had been put in jail because he was trying to get money to support his wife and son. Me.

I guess it was my turn to support him.

As Jackie said, I tended to get weepy, so I needed to say something that wouldn’t put me there now. “Only if you show me how to make a cat’s cradle.”

It was at that moment that I found out where my weepiness came from. I was trying to be cool, but my dad made no effort toward restraint. Burying his face in my chest, he began to bawl. As he held on to my shirt for dear life, he cried loud enough to knock the plaster off the walls.

“What did you do to him?” Jackie yelled as she clutched Toodles’s arms and tried to pull him away from big, bad me.

Part of me wanted to grab my father and hug him and cry with him, but another part was put off by his display. Toodles kept bawling, his face pressed hard against my chest. He started saying that he loved me and was glad I was his son, and that he was so proud of me and he knew men who’d read my books, and he loved me and wanted to be with me all his life, and—

Noble was clearly enjoying my discomfort, while Jackie was still trying to pull Toodles off. It was my guess that Jackie couldn’t understand what my father was saying. I think you needed to grow up with an accent like his to be able to understand it, especially when a man was howling and his mouth was full of shirt.

The part of me that was affected by my father’s copious tears seemed to be the part attached to my muscles because I couldn’t get Toodles off. Jackie was pulling, but making no headway as he was a strong little guy. I had my arms on his shoulders, but every time he said he loved me, my arms turned to wet spaghetti and I couldn’t push. “I love you” was not something I’d ever heard before from a blood kin. Heaven knows that my mother never said the words to anyone.

Noble finally took pity on me, pulled my father off, and got him seated at the table, where he hung his head and kept sobbing. Tessa moved her chair beside him, held his hand in hers, and got the hiccups as she tried not to cry with him. She kept looking at me in puzzlement. Had I done something good or bad to make her friend cry like that?

I was so weak I could hardly sit up.

We were a strange group. Toodles and Tessa sat on one side, him sobbing as though his heart was broken, her holding his hand and hiccuping. Jackie was at one end of the table looking like she was going to cry too but not knowing why. I was across from Toodles, feeling like a deflated ball, and Noble was at the other end of the table laughing at the lot of us.

Noble picked up a bowl of mashed potatoes and slapped a mountain of them onto Toodles’s plate, then put an equal amount of meat loaf and green beans beside the spuds. I saw where I got my good appetite.

But Toodles didn’t even look at the food.

“Did you know that Ford here can tell stories?” Noble said loudly, his words directed at Toodles. “He never was good around the house, hardly knows one end of a crowbar from the other, but he can tell stories like nobody else. My mom used to say that meals were never the same after Ford left home.”

“Yeah?” I said.

“Yeah,” Noble answered. “My dad said that all the lying of the Newcombes had gone into you so that you could tell the biggest, best lies of anybody on earth.”

“Yeah?” I said again. This was high praise indeed. I turned to look at Jackie to see if she was taking note of this, but she was looking as though she couldn’t tell if this was good or bad.

Toodles gave a big sniff, so Jackie got up to get him a tissue. After he’d blown his nose so loud that Tessa started to giggle, he winked at her, picked up his spoon, and said, “Tell me a story.”

I obliged.

It was after dinner that I told Noble I wanted to talk to him. I wanted the truth about what was going on. I’d known him too long and too well not to suspect he was up to something. We took a six-pack and went up to my office where we could talk man to man.

“Okay, so why are you here and what do you want?” I asked. “And think about who you’re talking to before you make up any lies.”

“I’ll leave the lies to you,” he said, his voice humble so he wouldn’t offend me.

I wasn’t fooled. Noble was a grown man and able-bodied. Even if he had been in prison a few times, he could find work, so why was he here? Why to me? Noble was well named. He had a great deal of pride, so I knew it would take some doing to find out what was in his mind.

It took me a while to get him to talk, but when he started, I thought he might never shut up.

He got off the couch and stood over me, glaring.

“I’m here because you ruined my life so I figure you owe me.”

“And how did I do that?” I asked calmly, keeping my own anger under control. What ingratitude! I’d never added up the amount of money I’d spent in giving free education to all the nieces and nephews, Noble’s kids, legitimate and otherwise, included, but it was a lot.

He was still glaring at me. “I used to be happy. I loved bein’ a kid near all my uncles, and I was crazy about my father. And you know something? When I look back at you and me, I thought we had a good time. Yeah, I know we all gave you a hard time, but you were such a snob you deserved it. You always looked down on us.”

Pausing, he waited for me to say something, but what could I say? To deny that I’d looked down on them? To feel that I was superior was the only defense I had.

“When you left for college, I was glad to see the last of you—but you know what? I missed you. You always made us laugh. The rest of us, we could do things with trucks and a pocketknife, but you could do things with words.”

Pausing for a moment, he took a drink of his beer and smiled in memory. “I was pretty mad when you left for college. You remember how I ran over your suitcase with the tractor? You were goin’ off to see the world, while I had a pregnant girlfriend and her dad was threatenin’ to shoot me if I didn’t marry her. Did you know that by the time I was twenty-one I’d been married and divorced two times and I had three kids to support? And all this happened while you were off at college meetin’ town girls.”

Noble drank some more beer, then sat down on the other end of the couch. His anger was gone now. We were just two men heading toward middle age, reminiscing. “Then you got a book published and all the aunts read it and said it was all about us. Only they said you’d made us look like we ate roadkill for dinner. Uncle Clyde’s wife said, ‘I don’t know who he’s talkin’ about but it ain’t us.’ So after that, we all pretty much decided that you didn’t remember any of us and you’d made up people to write about.”

Noble gave a little smile. “I can’t tell you how many times I was asked if I was kin to that ‘writer feller’ and you know what I said?”

He didn’t wait for me to answer, but I don’t think he wanted one. I think he’d waited a long time to tell me what he was saying now. In fact, maybe he’d driven all this way just to tell me what he thought of me.

“No. I told ’em no. Ever’ time somebody asked if I was kin to Ford Newcombe, I told ’em no.”

I tried to be philosophical about what he was saying, but I felt some hurt. Everyone wanted his relatives to be proud of him, didn’t he?

“You humiliated us to the world, but you know what was the worst thing you did to us? You changed the kids. My daughter, Vanessa, the one that was born right after you left for college, is just like you. She even looked like you, too, until she had her nose fixed. She read your book when she was just a kid, and after that she didn’t want nothin’ to do with us Newcombes.”

Noble opened another beer. “You can’t imagine all the ribbin’I got over that kid. People said she was yours, not mine.” He looked at me over the top of his beer. “You remember her mother? That little Sue Ann Hawkins? You didn’t…?”

Of course I remembered Sue Ann Hawkins. Every young man and a few old ones within twenty miles of her house had been to bed with her. Of course no one dared tell Noble that. Not then and not now. Back then, we kept our mouths shut and wished them luck on their wedding day. Later, half the county breathed a sigh of relief when the little girl was born with the Newcombe nose. Whether the nose had come from Noble, me or one of our other relatives had never been discussed even in private for fear of Noble’s legendary right hook.

Noble put up his hand. “No, don’t answer that one. That girl swore she’d only been to bed with me in her whole life, and if I hadn’t believed her, I wouldn’t have married her, her daddy’s shotgun or not. But if she was so damned pure, then why did she later take up with every—”

He stopped himself. “Naw, I won’t go into that. Let’s just say that her mother was so bad that Vanessa ended up livin’ with me from the time she was four. But after she read your book, she was livin’ with you in her mind. It was always, ‘My uncle Ford this’ and ‘my uncle Ford that’ until I wished I’d never saved you that time you fell into the creek and hit your head. You remember that? You remember how I carried you a mile and a half to get you home? I wasn’t an ounce bigger than you, but I carried you. Then Uncle Simon drove his old pickup across the fields and through the fences to get you to the hospital as fast as he could. When you didn’t wake up for two whole days, we thought you were a goner. You remember that?”

I did remember it. But, oddly, I hadn’t remembered it when I was writing my books.

“You know what?” Noble said, looking at me. “My daughter didn’t believe me when I told her about savin’ you. She said that if it’d really happened, you would have put it in your book, ’cause you put everything in there. And since it wasn’t in there, it didn’t happen. How come you didn’t put that story in there?”

I had to look away because I had no answer to that question.

“Well, anyway, you sent all four of my kids to college. Hell, you even sent my third wife money so she could go back to school and become a grade school teacher. She divorced me after her first year teachin’. Said I wasn’t educated enough for her. And now my college-educated kids don’t want anything to do with me. They want to see you, who they’ve laid eyes on maybe twice in their lives, but they don’t want to see their own dad. But you don’t have anything to do with any of us, do you? Except to write about us.”

While he took a deep drink from his beer, I waited in silence for him to continue. I must admit that I was fascinated at this look at how I’d “ruined” his life. I was also busy speculating if smart little Vanessa could be my daughter.

“So, anyway, when we got word that they was gonna let Toodles out, I thought it was time for you to pay up for what you’d done to us, and to me, especially. ‘King’? Did you have to name me ‘King’ in your books? Ain’t ‘Noble’ bad enough?”

“What do you want from me?” I asked. “You didn’t come here to cry in your beer, so what do you want?”

Noble took a while to answer. “I got into trouble at home. I don’t mean the jail time. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen the inside of a jail, as you well know. But this time I got into trouble with the family.”

I wasn’t about to tell him that Vanessa had already told me her version of the “family trouble.”

“After I got out of jail this last time, I had nothin’. My three ex-wives had cleaned me out, and nobody wants to give an ex-con a job, so all I could do was go back home. Uncle Zeb offered me a place at his house, said I could stay in the back room that he turns the heat off in—you know what an old skinflint he is. So I’m out there, freezin’ cold, and here comes Uncle Zeb’s new wife. You should see her. She’s about twenty-five and a dead ringer for Joey Heatherton. Remember her? Lord only knows why she agreed to marry an old coot like Uncle Zeb. So I wake up and she’s in bed with me. I’m a man and I hadn’t had a woman in a long time, so there was no way I wasn’t gonna give her what she wanted. The next mornin’she didn’t say nothin’ and I didn’t say nothin’, so I thought maybe things would be all right. But three months later, she’s over at Uncle Cal’s house and she’s cryin’ her eyes out, and she’s sayin’ that she’s a faithful wife, but I sneaked into her bed one afternoon while she was takin’ a nap, and now she’s gonna have my baby.”

I wanted to say that such a story wasn’t new in our family, but Noble barreled on ahead.

“Back when I was a kid, people would have been more understandin’ if somethin’ like this had happened. But you destroyed our family. When we was kids, the uncles would have laughed somethin’ like that off. And the girl wouldn’t have told in the first place. She was married to an old man who couldn’t give her what she wanted, and I did, so what was she upset about?”

He took a deep breath to calm his anger. “But that day she was cryin’ to the uncles, one of the kids you sent to college was there, and he said that what I did ‘is no longer done in our family.’That’s exactly what he said, ’cause that’s how they talk now. All hell broke loose and it was my own daughter, the oldest one, the one you ruined the first and the most, that told me I had to get out. She said she was ashamed of me and I had to leave. You know what they have now? ‘Family councils.’ Sounds like somethin’ off The Godfather movie, don’t it?”

Noble shook his head in disbelief. “You sent all the kids to college and what’d we get? They’ve ‘upgraded’ as they call it, so that now we’re like the Mafia. Some ‘upgradin’ huh?”

I had to work to keep from laughing, but I figured if I did laugh, Noble might take a swing at me. Not that I didn’t think I couldn’t take him, but, well, sitting behind a computer day after day…

“And you know what else you done to us? You ruined our land. There ain’t no more trailers. One of the kids—they’re all so clean now I can’t tell one from another—become an architect and he designed a bunch of little houses on Newcombe Land. Cute little places with garages to hide the cars in. The kid even designed matching doghouses and he bought each house somethin’ called a ‘pooper scooper.’ You know what that is? He said we had to use it to clean up all the dog ‘do-do.’That’s what he called it. A grown man! So all the trailers were hauled away, and the old swimmin’ hole was filled up just because it had a few leeches livin’ in it, and they built those little houses. All of them are alike except just an itty bit different. They look like they fell out of a box of cereal. And rules! Those houses come with rules. No tires left outside. Not even if you fill ’em full of flowers. No cars that don’t work. No weeds anywhere. We didn’t have as many rules in jail.”

Noble narrowed his eyes at me. “And you know what’s really bad? The whole place won awards. One of the nephews named the place and entered it in a contest and it won. You know what they named it? ‘Newcombe Manor Estates.’ Can you beat that?”

Speaking of awards, I should have been given one for containing my laughter. To hide my mirth, I held the beer can in front of my mouth until my lip began to freeze.

“So, anyway, they had a ‘family council’ and decided that I’d done ‘somethin’ unforgivable’ so I had to leave. Not one of the uncles stood up for me. They’ve got rich, college-educated kids to support ’em and make ‘investments’ for ’em, so they don’t have to do nothin’ but watch TV all day long and clean up the dog do-do before one of the kids arrives with those prissy little grandkids. Those kids told me I was a ‘throwback to a darker age.’ Can you believe anybody says things like that? When we were kids, what would one of the uncles have done if we’d said somethin’ like that? We would have had our behinds blistered until we wouldn’t be able to sit down even today.

“So, anyway, after they said I had to leave because I was ‘soilin’ the family name,’ I said, ‘What about Toodles?’ One of the kids—maybe one of mine, I can’t tell—said that Toodles was a criminal so he’d have to make it on his own. There’s no sense of family in those kids. None at all. So I said that if I was leavin’ I was gonna pick up Toodles and take him with me. See, I thought I’d get to their pride at that and they’d at least say they’d pay to send Toodles to some real nice old age home. But nobody said nothin’, so I took one of Uncle Cal’s old cars and headed out. And all the way to the Fed where they had him, I kept wonderin’ what I was gonna do with him when I got him. I didn’t have no place to live and no way to support myself, much less a way to take care of an old man with a bruised brain. But just before I got there, I thought, ‘Ford ruined our family so he owes us.’When I got to the prison I asked Cousin Fanner—You remember him? He works in the warden’s office now. Lifer.—if he knew where you was livin’ and he said that if you owned anything in the world, he’d be able to find you. So by the time Toodles was ready to leave, I had your address and we set out. And here we are.”

And, I thought, here to stay. I’ve said a lot of bad about my relatives—and all of it deserved—but I knew, in spite of what Noble had told me about current circumstances, that they had a sense of family. They tended to travel around a bit—my relatives discussed the pros and cons (no pun intended) of prisons like businessmen compared airports—but they always returned “home.” In fact, “home” was an important word to Newcombes.

As I sat there in silence with my cousin and went over his story in my mind, I knew what he was actually saying. He needed a home base. We might wake up tomorrow morning and find him gone, but he would leave some possession behind, a shirt, a pocketknife, something that would mean that my house was now his home.

His long story had been to tell me that right now he had no home base, no place to tie the far end of his leash.

All too well, I knew how that felt. After Pat died, I’d had no home base for years.

My problem in saying yes was that I was making a big commitment. We’d owned what we called “Newcombe Land” for a century. It was 146.8 acres of land that was owned jointly by all the adult Newcombes. When a boy or girl reached twenty-one, his/her name was put on the deed. The catch was that the land couldn’t be divided or sold without the written consent of every person on the deed. Since there were now over a hundred names on the deed, that didn’t seem likely to happen.

If I said Noble and my father could stay, I was making a sort of Newcombe vow. I’d have to stay here in this house in Cole Creek. If I moved, it would have to be done with the consent of Noble and my father.

Yeah, I knew it was ridiculous. I owned the house and I could sell it any time I wanted, but the rules that were taught to me when I was a kid were as strong in my mind as taboos against incest (something that wasn’t done in my family) and turning blood kin over to the law.

I took a deep breath. “There’re two unused bedrooms and a bath on the second floor. You and…” What did I call him? “Uh, Dad, can take those.”

When Noble nodded, then looked away, I knew he didn’t want me to see his smile of relief. When he looked back at me, he said, “This place is fallin’ down, but I ain’t got no tools to fix it.”

After a moment’s hesitation, I said, “Use the ones I have. The tools in the oak box.”

Noble looked shocked. “I can’t use them—not on my own anyway. Vanessa told me about those tools. She said they were famous. Said they were…” He thought. “She said they were a ‘symbol of a great love.’They were a…” He frowned in concentration. “She said those tools were a meta…Meta something.”

“Metaphor,” I said, also frowning. As Jackie said, gag me with a spoon. If my sending Vanessa to college had made her talk like that, I wished I’d not sent the money.

The truth was, I didn’t like to think of Newcombe Land being turned into some award-winning subdivision. I’d never thought of it consciously, but if I’d had kids—legal ones, that is—I’d have wanted them to swing out on a rope tied to a tree branch and jump into the Newcombe Pond. And what the hell did a few leeches matter? When I was in the second grade my teacher said, “We have a Newcombe in our class so let’s have him tell us all about leeches.” At the time I’d been bursting with pride, having no idea the teacher was being snide. But the laugh was on her because I went to the chalkboard and drew not only the exterior but the interior (don’t ask) of a leech. When I sat down, the whole class and the teacher were looking at me oddly. I didn’t know it until years later, but that afternoon in the teachers’ lounge I was christened “The Smart Newcombe.”

Smart is one thing, but pretentious is another. And my niece—daughter?—Vanessa was just too full of herself. “They’re tools,” I snapped. “Use them.”

From the way Noble grinned, I saw that he understood. Maybe he didn’t have the education to be able to reply to his uppity daughter, but I did.

“Yeah, tools,” Noble said as he left the room, still grinning.

Three minutes after I was finally alone, I was on the Internet and had typed in Russell Dunne’s name. It seemed like an eternity before the message came up saying that he wasn’t known. At least not the Russell Dunne who fit Jackie’s description.

At midnight, I went to bed. No Russell Dunne taught anything at any university in North Carolina. Darn, I thought, I was going to have to tell Jackie that her paragon of virtue was a liar. Darn, darn, darn. I smiled happily to myself and wondered if I should tell her over champagne and candlelight. Break it to her gently.

I went to sleep with a big smile on my face.