A/N: We move on, cross a state line.
Big Swamp
Chapter Seven: Pyne Park
No one seems to be in the long hallway we walk down, heading toward the basketball court. The dimness of the lights intensifies the felt coldness of the air-conditioning.
"I wish you hadn't called this place a mausoleum," Sarah whispers to me, pressing herself against my arm and tightening her grip on my hand.
We walk close together until we reach two large wooden doors. Each door contains a rectangular window, but not much can be seen. The lights are not on above the court. I stop and motion for Sarah to stand where she is. I walk to one of the windows and peer through it. Out at midcourt, I see Wylie Stroud. He's standing close to another man; they are talking intently. On the far end of the court, a facilities employee is sweeping the floor but he pays no attention to the little midcourt enclave. A few people are walking up above the court, above the seats, but pay no attention either. The speed at which they are walking suggests they are there for their health, using the long, enclosing oval to take a walk away from the outdoor heat.
Wylie puts his hand on the shoulder of the man and addresses him earnestly. I push the door open a crack, but they are too far from me for me to hear them as anything but a low murmur. I feel Sarah lean against me, her front flattens against my back, and Wylie could be screaming and I wouldn't hear — all I hear is my heart's drumbeat in my ears, my blood's lusty whoops as it marches double-time, flags flying, toward far-flung parts of my anatomy.
She leans harder against me and whispers into my ear. "Do you know that man?"
At the moment, I know one thing and one thing only: Sarah Walker. The warmth of her eclipses the rest of reality.
I finally take enough control of myself to choke out an answer. "No, never seen him before."
I reach into my pocket and grab my phone, and take a close-up photo of the two men. I look at it on the screen; Sarah does too, sliding herself from my back to my side.
"Good clandestine photo, superspy." She giggles softly against my ear, breathy again, her lips brushing the lobe.
It's too much. I turn to her, my arm encircles her, and I kiss her, lightly, but on her full lips. I pull back, afraid I've overstepped, that I will see that look in her eyes. But I don't see it. She wraps her warm hand around the back of my neck and pulls me to her, kisses me, my lips, and not lightly. I hear Auburn's pep band playing, even without a basketball game, even without the pep band.
She does finally pull back. Her eyes are large. Surprise shows in them, despite the coy smile on the lips I just kissed. "Are you this eager with all your clients?" She's not giggling but a hint of it lingers in her voice.
"When I splurge, I go whole-hog." The words are out before I consider them and she recognizes them. She's about to laugh, or I think she is, hope she is, when her face changes. She can still see through the window over my shoulder.
"He's coming!"
I don't take time to look to see who she means, Wylie or the other man. I grab her hand and we run the way we came, but turn into an open doorway, a classroom. I swing the door closed but not shut, and we put our backs to the interior wall of the room. A moment later, footsteps echo past.
I put my finger to my lips and then gesture for Sarah to follow me. She gives me a confused look but nods. We go out of the room and into the hallway. The man is just going through an exit, out into the sunlight.
I let him get several strides into the parking lot then I follow him. Sarah is behind me. "What are we doing, Chuck?"
"I want to know who that is."
The man walks to a rusty red Ford pickup and gets in. He's parked not far from my Camry. He pulls out, driving slowly, and I gesture for Sarah to stay low. No one is near us at the moment to wonder what we are doing. Keeping cars between us and the pickup, we make it to the Camry just a few seconds after he passes it. We get in and I pull out. The pickup is getting ready to leave the lot. I do not hurry. It's a Monday in mid-summer — the campus is not crowded, not busy. The pickup turns out of the lot. I let a University bus, orange and blue, pass before I pull out after the pickup, the bus between us.
"Chuck, what are we doing?"
"We're following this guy. I'm hoping we can figure out who he is, where he's going." I reach over and push the lock on the glove box. It falls open revealing a couple of small notebooks and a few ink pens.
Sarah stares into the glovebox. "I thought there'd be a gun."
"I don't carry one," I confess but do not mention the one in my office. "Grab a pen and a notebook, please, and jot down the pickup's license plate number. It's a Georgia plate."
Sarah gets a notebook and a pen and stares ahead. She writes down the number. "Got it." She looks at me expectantly. I keep following the pickup.
The man turns onto College Street, the main road through Auburn, heading south. I keep after him.
Sarah keeps looking at me, at the truck, at me. "Why are we following him, Chuck? We have the plate. Isn't that enough?"
"Nope," I say, "I want to know where he goes after his conversation with Uncle Wylie."
"Maybe he's just going to get coffee, or get gas," Sarah responds.
"Maybe, but let's see."
She says nothing more but the atmosphere in the car has become less comfortable. She keeps stealing glances at me out of the corner of her eye. She's regretting the kiss and wishing she could get away from me, instead of being trapped in the car. So I figure. To make things easier on her, I decide to pretend the kiss never happened, intensify my focus on the pickup.
The pickup travels down College Street a distance then turns onto I-85 North. He'd gone south to go north, but that was the quickest route to the Interstate. Sarah fidget as we follow the truck onto the interstate. "This is above and beyond, Chuck. Who knows how far this guy might go? How far he might drive?"
I nod but do not change course. "If he goes too far, we'll stop. But I doubt he took that old beater on any around the world cruise. He's not going far — no more than an hour, I bet."
Sarah looks at me and shakes her head but I have the case between my teeth now and I'm not about to let go. I may be soft-boiled but I am a serious detective. Wylie stymied me at the Club, but this fellow I am following feels like a loose thread. Tug him, and I'll find the answer Sarah hired me to get, earn my pay.
I drive on. The man clearly has no worry about being tailed. I make no effort to be fancy. I just get in the left-hand lane and follow him.
We drive for twenty, thirty, thirty-five minutes. Sarah's not said much. Neither have I. She suggested we stop a couple of times but I just shook my head. I know she's annoyed. I hate it when I have to piss off the client to do the job for the client. I hate that generally but I hate it in this case so much it makes my stomach hurt.
When we get to forty minutes, my heart starts to sink. We're near LaGrange, Georgia. We crossed the state line a while back. The truck took the exit to the massive Kia plant and I thought he might be going there, but he went on past it, on toward West Point Lake. I have a premonition — sort of.
We wind through some back roads and then, to my relief, the pickup turns on its blinker just before getting to the entrance to Pyne Park. It's not where I feared he was taking us, but I'm surprised this was his destination. I've been to the Park before, a couple of years ago. Ellie and I went out for a drive one Sunday and ended up here. There's not much to it. The lake, West Point Lake, huge and beautiful, and a lot of lakeside, a dock, a couple of permanently closed restrooms, and a couple of piers. Concrete picnic tables stand, half gray, half mossy green, beneath old, tall pines at various spots in the park
The pickup drives to the parking area near the defunct restrooms. A car is already parked there. It's a shining and massive old yellow Cadillac. The man gets out of the pickup and Wade Peterson, Jane Peterson's son, gets out of the Caddy. I want to yell Shit but I don't. But my damn premonition — I don't believe in them, by the way — was right. My conversation with Langston Graham floods back into my mind. Shit, shit, shit.
Sarah studies Wade Peterson through the windshield. He's at a distance but easy to see in the bright sunshine. I can tell she has no idea who he is — at least, it looks like she doesn't. She noticed me tense up when Wade got out of the car. "Who is that, Chuck? Do you know him?"
I'm not sure what to say. I'm not sure what case I am now on, Sarah's or Langston's. Langston wants what I was doing for him to be confidential. So does Sarah. But Wade's identity isn't confidential, just each side of the dual nature of my interest in him.
"That's Wade Peterson. I don't know him personally, but I know him by sight."
Sarah stares at him for a moment, then turns to me, her beautiful face a question mark. "Peterson? Like Jane Peterson, the woman who owned the Hall?"
"Yes," I nod, trying not to seem too interested in this fact or too uninterested — like Goldilocks, I want to be just interested enough. Interested just right. "He's her son. You've never met him?" My tone is flat but not bored.
She shakes her head convincingly. "No, never seen him or even heard his name. Wylie once mentioned that the woman had a son, but he never mentioned him by name. Why would this fellow meet with Wylie then meet with Peterson?"
"I don't know," I venture truthfully, "I don't know." But it worries me. Shit, it worries me.
"Are we done now or do you want to keep following rusty pickup guy, or start following Wade Peterson?"
"I guess we're done. But, since we're up here, and since the rain is gone, let's go to another of the parks — they're everywhere around the lake, and walk a little, stretch our legs?"
I cross my fingers — mentally. My hands are in full view on the steering wheel. I'd like to spend more time with her. See if she says anything about that kissing thing. Or, better yet, if she'd like to try it again. It's steamy — but that's sort of my idea.
She shakes her head. "No, I need to get back. Thanks, Chuck."
I nod and we drive out of the park. As we head back to the interstate, Sarah asks: "Can you use the license plate number I wrote down to find out who the guy in the rusty pickup is?"
"Probably."
"Probably?" The note of annoyance is back in Sarah's voice.
"Well," I begin, "I have a friend at the DMV…"
She waits. "And…"
"Not so much an 'and'; it's more a 'but'."
"But…" she says, an angry 'but'.
"But she's...unpredictable. I have to trade favors, and her trades always work out in her favor."
"Your favor is in her favor?"
"That's about the size of it. So, I don't ask often." I shake my head to underline my comment.
"Who is this? It's not that...Hannah, is it?" Sarah narrows her eyes.
"No, not Hannah. She works at Ed's Diner. No, this is a woman, but she's more my sister's friend than mine. Ellie went to school with her. Her name's Jill. Jill Roberts."
"And she's more Ellie's friend?"
"Yeah. I had a crush on her when I was younger. She used to come to the house and I would sneak around to get a peek at her."
"Is that still how it is?" I can't tell if she's still angry or if she's now just toying with me.
"No, no. She's married, with two kids. I like her husband, Will — he's a chemistry prof at Auburn — but I feel sorry for him. She's...let's say Jill's not low maintenance in any aspect of her life — not just at the DMV."
Sarah doesn't say much for the rest of the drive. I don't take her all the way back to Auburn — just to Opelika. Her Porsche's parked across from the Courthouse. She never mentions the kiss and I don't either. We make small talk about the weather, the kudzu, but mostly we ride in silence.
I cannot figure her out. To say she runs hot and cold is too household-ish. She's not like some mundane faucet. She's more like the equator and the arctic circle, or a blast furnace and a meat locker. She melts me and she freezes me. The shifts from liquid to solid have me in a state.
She says goodbye warmly enough but not as warmly as I'd like: no kiss, not even a touch of her hand as she gets out of my car and into hers. She leaves the Auburn cap on the seat.
I watch her drive away.
By the time I get back to the office, Morgan's getting on his bike to go home.
He invites me to dinner — Bolonia's making baked chicken and sweet potatoes — but I beg off. Hungering after Sarah Walker and consuming one of Bolonia's feasts are not obviously compatible. I'm too empty to face being full if that makes any sense.
Probably not. I'm babbling, glub, glub. Like Morgan, I should forfeit words and manage with sounds.
I need to finish this case for Sarah.
I need to finish with Sarah. For my own good.
It must be obvious to her she could have me if she wants me, have me for as long as she's here — no one's indicated how long that will be. It would be better to refuse her but I'm honest enough with myself to know there's no chance. She may refuse fried food and processed sugar but I've no power to refuse her. — She's had me since the first day in the waiting room.
If I were like my detective heroes, Phillip Marlowe, say, I'd be more indifferent to how this plays out — but though I may be able to channel a little of Marlowe's form, I can't really channel his content. He's a harder man than I know how to be — although he's not as hard as his reputation among inattentive readers suggests.
Sarah's harder than I know how to be too. I don't mean she's hard either, any more than Marlow. But that thing with her eyes, that look I struggle to describe, — that's beyond my ken, my reach, so it's probably no surprise I can't describe it. I can't live it; I have no first-person access to it. My POV can't reach that level of objectivity. I see things in personal terms, and I can't help it. Ellie complains about it sometimes. As a doctor, she manages that dissector's gaze occasionally.
Not me. I'm not exactly sorry about that, or ashamed of it, but it may be a career killer for a PI.
Morgan pedals away and I start to unlock the door, then reconsider. I go around the building to Langston's office door. The sign says Closed so I go back to my door, but again, I don't unlock it.
I get back in the car and go home.
Ellie's rocking on the porch, abstracted, smiling to herself. Mondays are usually hard days for her — crowds of parents with over-the-weekend sick kids show up and overwhelm her. But she seems good.
She notices me as I walk up to the house and she points to the other rocker. A pitcher of what looks like lemonade is on the small table between the rockers. An unused glass of melting ice stands sweating beside the pitcher.
"Lemonade?"
She nods and grins. "With gin dumped in. Medicinally, you know."
Laughing, I sit and pour some over the melting ice. I take a long swallow, puckering. I somehow always forget how sour Ellie likes her lemonade to be.
"You seem in a good mood for a Monday evening."
She grins again. "I am. Dr. Woodcomb came by and took me to Ed's for lunch. We were kind of hoping to see you there. I really want the two of you to meet. I know you saw each other at the party but…"
"Right. Morgan and I had sandwiches from Chuck's."
Ellie frowns. "You need a meal that does not come between slices of bread, Chuck."
"I suppose."
"How was your Monday?" Ellie asks as she pours herself a little more from the pitcher.
"Surprisingly...surprising. I got a new case and I believe I made some progress on it and my other case both today."
"That's good. I suppose you can't tell me anything?"
I nod. "Not a thing."
She frowns again. "It's frustrating that neither of us can talk much about work."
"Yeah," I agree, "it'd be nice to know some details once in a while."
"Were you in the office all day? Or were you actually out investigating?"
"Out investigating."
"Say," Ellie says, "I talked to Hannah. She asked about you. You didn't talk to her today?"
"No," I kissed Sarah Walker today and I wanted to kiss her again and again. — But I don't say that. I rock.
Ellie gives me a look, half mother, half sister. "How do you think it would feel, Chuck, pining away for someone who can't or won't make up his damned mind?"
I give no answer but I know how that feels.
I take out my phone and text Father Casey, asking if we can chat tomorrow morning. I could use some wise counsel, even if it comes packaged as abuse.
Jesus, the Episcopal priest is harder than I am!