Author: CJ Birch
Category: Other
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Robin went unnoticed as she swam through the crowd, nudging her way to the periphery. The appropriate viewing box of the observer. Mrs. Forrester had invited her the other day when she spoke with her. Midway between sitting and standing, she said, “You should come to the wake.” The words were strung together as one. Not for the first time, Robin felt like a leech attaching herself to the pain of others.
Everyone had broken into smaller groups, munching on snacks from tiny paper plates held in one hand, a drink in the other. A circus act in the making as they balanced their drinks in various positions to shovel crab cakes and deviled eggs into their mouths.
The entire affair made Robin’s skin crawl. It was the inevitable awkwardness of missing your mouth and dropping the food either on the floor or, worse, on yourself. Then would come the required cleaning. First, finding somewhere to set your plate and drink. Then dabbing at the spot on your shirt until it blended enough that some might wonder if that dark smudge was, in fact, part of the pattern. The ceremony was such an ordeal. Like anyone cared if your neighbor’s carpet had one more stain on it. This was why Robin never ate at these types of functions. She also rarely drank, in case she had too much and said something stupid or insulting. A wallflower under duress because, truth be known, her natural instinct was to butt in and argue her opinion with every gigantic ass who mistook superiority for ignorance.
If she wasn’t here on assignment, she would have grabbed a gin and tonic in the kitchen. If she wasn’t here on assignment, she would have pushed her way into the conversation happening over by the palm in the corner. She would have demanded the obese woman in the stretchy black dress explain why gay conversion camps weren’t a form of child abuse. If she wasn’t here on assignment she would have walked over to Sheriff Elle Ashley as she stepped into the room and offered Elle her gin and tonic. She wanted to see the effect it would have on her lips as she took a sip. But also because she looked like she could use it. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, one side pulled back and tucked behind her ear. The red framed her pale skin to perfection. The dress she wore was all cling and plunge and scoop. Robin gulped.
Robin wasn’t the only one to notice Sheriff Ashley’s arrival. As she made her way to Janice Forrester standing in the corner, eyes broke free from conversations and followed her progress. Not only male eyes either. Something in the room had changed. A current had charged the atmosphere. The entertainment had arrived.
But before the first act could begin, Chuck Forrester stood up, slapping the projector as he went. This got a few people’s attention. He cleared his throat. A few more turned as he faced the group. Elle stopped moving through the crowd. Intermission. The rest of the assemblage forced their attention on Chuck.
“I want to thank you all for coming.” He sighed and rubbed his forehead at the banality of that statement. He started again. “Jessie would’ve been very grateful…if he could be here.” He turned back to the fast-fold screen. A faint blue logo grew darker as the projector warmed up. “I wanted to do something to remember Jessie by so I put together this compilation from over the years. It’s still kind of rough, but I wanted something to show everyone.” His eyes met Elle’s as he said this last bit. She smiled. It was a comforting smile. As if to say that everything was going to be all right. He stepped out of the way and pressed a button on the remote tucked into his hand.
The room became quiet, waiting for the black screen to become something. The unaffected grin of a toothless baby popped onto the screen, Jessie, Robin assumed. This was replaced with a few more school pictures of Jessie as he aged. They gradually morphed to look like the adult he would become. The white curls shortened and darkened. The giant teeth grew less so as his face developed to match. The pictures faded into a video of a preteen Jessie throwing a football at his dad. A strong arm, even at that age. His dad laughed as it sailed over his head. There were more videos now, of Jessie climbing a tall oak tree, running up to the camera, grinning. Jessie tanning on a pool lounge chair, his chest dark from a summer of doing that. From out of frame an avalanche of water soaked Jessie and he jumped out of the chair. Loud feminine laughter echoed off-screen. The camera jerked to include a figure in a green bikini running toward the pool. Long red hair flowed behind her. Robin’s face and chest went red hot as the woman turned toward the camera, running back away from Jessie. It was Elle as a teenager. The recognition burned a hole through the pit of her stomach. Carefree laughter as Jessie scooped her up in one arm and jumped into the pool with her. It was only a flash, almost over before it had begun. The images moved onto more football, graduations, birthdays.
Robin turned to gauge Elle’s reaction, but she was gone. She started inching toward the kitchen as images from Jessie and Cindy’s wedding flickered on screen.
Chapter Fifteen
The grass felt cool scrunched between Elle’s folded toes, despite the heat. Her shoes lay discarded halfway between the Forresters’ back door and the homemade swing she had plopped on. She pillowed her forehead on the rope. It snaked up into the foliage canopying the backyard. The roughened barbs dug into her skin. It felt good to feel something, even if it wasn’t pleasant. The first physical release she’d had all day.
The funeral hadn’t been so bad. Not until the end. When the other mourners escaped to their air-conditioned cars, leaving Elle standing at the head of the casket alone. Green Astroturf covered the surrounding ground to hide the mess of digging a grave. It dug into her bare knees as she knelt.
“I’m sorry.” She leaned her head against the polished edge. The smell of fresh earth clung to the insides of her nostrils. She wrapped the scent up to be opened and remembered later.
She pulled open her purse and removed a CD case. Written along the top in purple gel pen were the words For Jessie. Liquid Paper hearts and stars covered the surface of the case front to back. It was the CD she’d made to give him as soon as he got home from college. The last CD she’d made for him. It had spent the last decade keeping her socks company. Elle placed it on the coffin and pushed herself to her feet. There she stopped, unable to move beyond the green Astroturf carpet. Lying next to the white flowers on the coffin, the image of the CD took on a frivolity her mother would have called inappropriate for the occasion. Somewhere behind her were two stones, side by side, waiting to be joined by two more. She didn’t remember their funeral. Only the white sheets thrown back over their dead bodies. That’s what she’d taken away from it all. Two white sheets in place of tombstones she’d never visited.
People weren’t their final resting places. They were memories and gifts and forgotten items. An old bottle of cologne lost among expired prescriptions, favorite song associations. Even now, whenever she heard “Lady in Red,” she couldn’t help but picture her mother humming at the sink, cutting flowers. Her feet bare, covered in fallen leaves. A decade from now, what would she remember about this funeral? She hoped it would be the CD case among beautiful white flowers, but the string of nightmares she’d had the last few nights told her it would be something else. An image she couldn’t even wipe from her waking hours.
The sun at its apex beat down, the heat oppressive. But Elle couldn’t leave. She wanted more than a silent good-bye. She wanted answers. More than anything, she wanted to find who had put him here and wash the memory of a life not lived from her mind.
In the end, it had taken Janice Forrester coming up behind her to jerk her back to reality.
“Reverend Hansen never misses an opportunity, does he?” Janice asked, stopping next to Elle.
A polite smile from Elle.
“Will you join us at the wake?” Janice touched Elle’s arm, then jerked it back. Elle turned toward warm eyes. They were sad but held only concern. The anger and betrayal from the past week were gone. Buried like her son under polish and sorrow. A hawk cried out above and swooped down toward the low hills of the cemetery. It was carrying something in its mouth. Janice waited for Elle’s response, but when she didn’t get one, she said, “You
know where we are. It would be nice to have you there.” She squeezed Elle’s arm.
Now, as she sat under the shade of the Forresters’ giant oak, she wondered if she’d made a mistake coming back here. Like a lion’s cage, some things weren’t meant to be opened. Just being here, Elle had freed the lion. It rampaged her thoughts, ripped through memories, attacked her senses. This backyard and every inch of it had imprinted itself on her.
The slap of the screen door made her look up. It was Robin. Her black suit jacket hung over one arm, curtaining the pair of beers clasped in her hand. She stopped at the rail of the deck, taking in the enormity of the oak before her. It had that effect on people. That tree had been there long before Private Jesse Flynn settled his family into farm life. It would outlive the Forresters. Its branches spread out across the backyard, offering its shade as easily as a child offers a smile. In fall, Chuck trimmed the branches closest to the house so that winter storms wouldn’t bring them crashing onto the roof. But by summer the foliage had grown back to touch the edge of the eaves.
Robin stepped off the deck and headed toward Elle near the center of the shade. She paused at Elle’s discarded heels. Lying in the grass, they were almost obscured by the unmown lawn.
Robin toed her own heels off and walked the rest of the way in bare feet. She thrust a beer at Elle. It perspired, like everything else in Flynn County that day. “Here, I thought you could use this.” She took a seat on the other swing, arranging her skirt so it didn’t ride up.
Elle took the beer but, instead of taking a sip, placed it on the ground next to her feet.
“What are you doing here?” Elle asked.
“Janice invited me.”
“Why?”
“Why did she invite me? Or why would she invite someone like me?”
Elle shrugged as if it didn’t matter which one she answered.
“I honestly couldn’t tell you why she invited me. I almost didn’t come but then thought it would be rude if I didn’t,” Robin said.
The only sound for several minutes was the creak of rope on the giant bough above them. The afternoon sun glazed the tips of the trees. The shivering leaves made a sound like waves rolling up a sandy bank.
Robin swept her hair off the back of her neck. “Is it always this hot?”
“Did you come all the way out here to ask me about the weather?” Without meaning to, she’d thrust all her hostility, all her frustration into that one question.
“My mother always says, ‘if you’re talking about the weather, then it’s time to go.’ I find it’s usually a better opener than ‘how are you holding up?’”
“Maybe next time you should just say nothing.”
“If you were aiming for the biggest bitch award, I think you’ve cinched it.” Robin softened it with a wink.
“Huh.” Elle picked up the beer at her feet and brought it to her lips. “I’ve never won an award for anything.” She sipped. Robin watched her mouth form around the rim. “My mother used to win awards for her pies. I’m horrible at baking.”
“I suppose that’s because you’re better at other things.”
Elle laughed, “Sure, like breaking up illegal keg parties.” She took another sip. “I’m great at that.” With the sweaty beer clutched in her hand she began pumping her legs. “I’ve had the oddest memory going around and around in my head all day.” She pumped a few times more, reaching greater heights, before continuing. “One night when I was seventeen, Jessie and I decided to sneak out and meet up on the edge of Old Bailey’s spread. There’s this great pond tucked away in the forest about a mile into his property on the north side. We decided it would be a great idea to hijack one of his hogs and see if it could swim. Hilarious, right? We had this grand idea that it would just float around like a dog using its tiny legs to paddle across the pond. Well.” She turned to make sure she had Robin’s full attention. She did. “I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to get a hog to go where you want it, but I suspect you’d have an easier time getting your virginity back. So there’s Jessie, in the pen crouched down like a football’s about to be hiked to him, big grin on his face, waiting for me to open the gate. Which I do. And this hog barrels out like I’d lit its ass on fire.” Elle slowed her swinging so she could use her hands to demonstrate.
“It runs straight at Jessie, knocks into him like a linebacker, then comes rounding back for me. It broke two of Jessie’s fingers. He was on the sideline for six weeks, which of course everyone blamed me for. The next morning my father told me the only thing I’d ever be good at was getting into trouble. I spent the next year and a half proving him right.”
“I thought this story was going to have a completely different plot when you first mentioned the middle of the night and a pond,” Robin said.
“That was a different pond.” Through the hint of powder on her face, Robin could make out the faint markings of a bruise from where Elle’d caught Randy Pritchard’s punch. “My father thought it was a joke when I told him I wanted to study criminology at the University of Chicago.” She pumped her legs harder, soaring into the sky as she did. “I wonder if he’d be laughing if he could see me now?”
“If he could see you now, would you be in this situation? I mean would you be sheriff of Flynn County? Would you be investigating Jessie’s murder?”
Elle slowed, dragging her feet along the grass until she came to a stop. She turned to look at Robin, wondering if she was trying to be cruel or just curious. “No. I wouldn’t have come home after school.”
“Are you sorry you did?”
“Sometimes.” She surprised even herself. Most days Elle could trick herself into pretending she was happy here. She liked her job and she enjoyed working with Stan and Neil. But it was too easy. She missed the challenge. She’d spent her whole life proving she was smarter than everyone, either by not getting caught or by excelling in tasks others failed. Now her biggest challenge was keeping EJ out of trouble, which wasn’t so much rewarding as it was frustrating. She sighed. “I never wanted to be EJ’s jailer. But he’s so hardheaded I don’t know what else to do.” She leaned back on the swing and closed her eyes. “He’s too much like me.”
“But you turned out okay.”
She shook her head, silent for a few moments before she said, “I was kind of forced to grow up.”
Before Robin could voice her next question there was a loud crash from inside the house. Elle took off from the swing at a run.
* * *
Elle entered the Forresters’ living room to see Cindy squared off against one of the stubbiest men she’d ever seen. There was no other way to describe him. His girth almost exceeded his height. He stared up at Cindy, his bulk more intimidating than if he’d been seven feet tall.
The remnants of potato salad and tuna casserole blanketed the floor around them. The presentation had finished, and Chuck had stopped packing up to watch, along with the rest of the crowd. Janice gripped Cindy’s arm, for support or encouragement, Elle wasn’t sure.
Seam Holt raised his hands in peace. “I’m not here to ruin your get-together.” He swayed a bit. Drunk. That was just like Holt. The last time Elle had seen him, he’d been drunk too. But that was over a decade ago. He’d followed Jessie to Georgia Tech on a football scholarship but had ruined his knee first term. He’d come back the last term demanding a job on the Cavalier coaching staff. He’d made a big scene their last game. Coach Saunders told him to get lost and Holt had thrown a bucket of Gatorade at the man’s head. Sheriff Bailey put him in lockup for the night and that was the last time she’d seen him. She heard he’d gotten a job in Evansville with UPS.
“Your husband was a good man, I just want to acknowledge that and pay my respects.” He placed his hand over his heart at this last bit. His fingers were like sausages tied tight at the joints. Then he pointed to the ground. “Sorry for the mess,” he grumbled in a voice full of phlegm. He turned to leave.
As soon as the screen door slapped shut, Elle crossed the living
room to follow him.
She found him standing next to a rented Taurus, fumbling in his pockets for his keys.
“Holt?”
He let his gaze run the length of her. “And you are?”
“It’s me, Elle.”
He blinked a few times, clearing the fog. Then his face came alive in a broad grin. “Elle the belle!”
He grabbed her in a bear hug, lifting her off the ground. He smelled like BO and whiskey. He bounced her a few times, then let her fall back to the ground.
The screen door slapped against the frame and Elle turned to see Neil coming out of the house. He leaned against the wall, watching, munching on a plate of crab cakes. He knew Elle could take care of herself. He’d seen her take down drunks twice her size with little more than the will to do it. But he wanted her to know he was there. Just in case. He even gave a little wave.
Elle turned back to Seam. “How are you?” She tilted her head as she asked.
He nodded toward the house. “You and Cindy get along okay, do you?” He found the key and twirled it around his thick finger. “Jess said he was coming down to visit you. He get in touch?”
Elle shook her head. “Nope. I haven’t seen him in years. When was the last time you saw him?” Like Cindy, Elle towered over the man. Even without her heels, which she’d forgotten in the grass out back.
“Couple weeks ago. He came down to see me. Asked to borrow some money. Wasn’t the first time. I wish like hell now I had it to give. Is it true someone killed him?”
Elle nodded. Her throat had closed up, making it hard to speak. It was hard seeing Holt like this and not getting sentimental. He represented an earlier time. An easier time. She wished like hell she could go back and leave all this behind.
“How long are you in town for?” she asked.