Larkspur Cove (10 page)

I can’t help these people,
I thought as I walked away.
I don’t even
know where to start.
Counseling here was a world away from seeing clients at a church counseling center in Houston. Even at the crisis center, people had come in because they knew they were in desperate need, but here . . . How could you help someone who didn’t want help? Who only wanted to convince you to sign off on some form, so they could keep doing what they’d always been doing?

The sad thing was that my parents were right. This job was unpredictable, potentially dangerous, and I didn’t belong in it. If Tamp didn’t mind threatening school bus drivers, beating up his girlfriend, and drowning kittens, how safe was I? If I were working at the bank, short of a bank robbery, I’d be safe, but I’d never make enough money to provide a good life for Dustin and myself. We’d always be scraping by, taking help-money from my parents.

Aside from that, there was a nagging voice deep within me, warning that if I quit this job now, I’d never have the courage to do something like this again. My life in the future would be what my life had always been – a repetitive pattern of concentric circles, safely inside the box. I’d never become what I’d always dreamed of being – a woman like Aunt Lucy, who wasn’t afraid to take on the world and do the good that would have gone undone without her.

On the other hand, if I continued in this position, I’d have to figure out how to actually do the job.

Hard to say which option was more frightening. I contemplated my dilemma while seeing to my last visit of the day, a young mother who was struggling to care for a son with autism and three other kids, while her husband was deployed with the military. Her preteen daughter had run away from home, twice. They recognized the need for help, and even though lines of family communication were slow in forming, we did make progress. I gave them some family projects to complete before our next visit, and they sounded like they’d try.

I left the session and headed home with a renewed sense of energy about the day. Maybe I really could do this job. I just had to be bold and keep learning. A lot and quickly.

It wasn’t until I passed the Waterbird and spotted a game warden’s truck in front that I remembered I was supposed to answer the question of Dustin’s punishment before five o’clock today.

It was already five forty-five.

The bigger the fisherman, the bigger the tale.

– Anonymous

(Left by five old friends
      on an annual fishing trip)

Chapter 8

Mart McClendon

“I’m telling you, Mart, there’s something going on. Daddy saw it. . . . Didn’t you, Daddy?” Sheila had been on a tear since the minute I strolled into the Waterbird to pick up a deli sandwich for supper. It was hard to figure why she was so hung up on poor old Len Barnes and the little girl she thought she’d spotted by the Big Boulders yesterday. It seemed to me like poor old Len had enough trouble already. Other than fish-and-game violations, he seemed harmless enough, but Shelia was on this like a dog on a bone.

She was shaking a finger toward the Big Boulders while she talked. “Len was over there running trotlines again this morning, and there was someone moving around in the bushes. Whoever it was didn’t come all the way to the shore this time, so I couldn’t get a good look, but someone was there. Someone small, like a child.”

“He’s got all those mutt dogs. That could’ve been what you saw in the brush,” Burt suggested. He and Nester were holed up at the corner table, nursing coffee and having a domino game because it was too hot to fish.“I saw him out at the Crossroads selling tomatoes, as usual, and he was all by himself, except he had a great big dog with him – pit bull, I’d say. Kind of whitish-colored with a brown snout. He’d tied it to his bumper and parked the truck up the ditch a ways, then brought all his vegetable crates down to the shoulder. Guess he figured he better keep that dog away from the customers. I was glad of it. That mutt flashed a little tooth when I stopped. I bought my tomatoes and got out of there. I didn’t want to trust my life to Len’s knot-tying skills.”

Nester glanced at me and winked to let me know he was about to put one over on Burt. “Mart, did you know I had a dog like that once? Big ol’ pit bull, but then I found him out in the yard one day, deader’n a post.”

“I didn’t know that, Nester,” I said, playing along with the joke, whatever it’d be. I leaned up against the counter, getting comfortable.

Burt hooked an elbow over the back of the booth. “Nester, what are you talking about? You didn’t have any pit bull dog.”

“You never saw ’im,” Nester insisted. “Thing died two days after I bought it. Was a high-dollar animal, too. Paid two hundred bucks for him, over to the swap meet. Once he died, I called that dog breeder over in Gun Barrel City, and I said, ‘Mister, you sold me a defective dog. He up and died.’

“Well, then that fella, he tried to tell me I was mistaken. ‘Ain’t no way that dog’s dead,’ he says to me. ‘You get me some proof he’s dead, well, I’ll give your money back.’ ”

Shaking her head, Sheila leaned across the counter and muttered, “Mart, you better run while you can.They’ll go on like this all night.” She poured a cup of coffee for me, and I picked it up and took a sip. Decaf, no doubt. I should’ve had Pop get my coffee.

Nester launched into the rest of a story that promised to be entertaining, if not strictly factual. “So I load that dog up in the truck, and I take him to the vet. Old Doc Brown, he thinks I’m a little crazy, but he says okay, he’ll check the dog over. So here in a minute, he brings in a little gray house cat. He puts that cat on the table, and the cat walks around my dog once, twice, three times, then he sits down on the floor and shakes its head, real solemnlike.

“The vet says to me, he says, ‘Yes, sir, yer dog’s dead.’

“So I tell him, ‘Doc, I gotta have more proof than the say-so of a house cat. There’s two hundred dollars on the line here.’

“The vet says to me, ‘All right, then.’ He goes out the door with the cat and comes back with a brown Labrador.The lab, he takes one look at the examination table, then sits down and shakes his head. Doc says, ‘Yep, your dog’s dead all right.’

“ ‘Listen, Doc,’ I say. ‘I got to have some real proof other than the say-so of a house cat and a Labrador.’

“Ol’ Doc, he just smiles and scribbles somethin’ on a piece of paper and hands it to me and says, ‘Fella, you just call up that man and tell him this dog’s sure enough dead, and you got the cat scan and the lab report to prove it!’ ”

Nester reared back and slapped his knee, impressed that he’d sucked Burt into his joke. Burt pulled his hat down over his eyes and shook his head, Pop Dorsey hee-hawed so hard he knocked his wheelchair into the coffee counter, and Sheila groaned and rolled her eyes. I had to give Nester credit. I hadn’t heard that one before.

“That’s a good’un,” Pop said finally.

Nester grinned. “It’s all true.” He pointed to a fish-shaped sign on Pop’s wall of wisdom.“Just like that sign says,
The bigger the fisherman,
the bigger the tale.
”

Sheila stepped out from behind the counter. “Well, you boys can swap jokes all you want, but I’m telling you, Len’s got a child with him. I’m not imagining things.”

“Nobody’s seen her but you,” Nester pointed out.

Sheila gave him a frustrated look. “Mart, didn’t you see
anything
over there on shore by the Big Boulders? Footprints or anything? That little girl must’ve left footprints when she came down to the shore yesterday, and she must’ve been with that old man. He was the only one around there, and then today, someone’s prowling around in the bushes near where he’s fishing? That doesn’t seem weird to you?”

The door chimed, but none of us turned to look right away. Everyone’s attention was fastened on me.

I took off my hat and scratched my head, sorry that the all-nighter with the gators had kept me from checking out the Big Boulders yesterday and settling the latest argument at the Waterbird. “By the time I went by there today, it’d rained. There weren’t any tracks. I didn’t come across Len, and I didn’t see any sign of a little girl. My guess is Burt’s right. What you saw was probably one of those mutts Len’s always carting around in that old truck of his.”

Sheila gave me a disgusted look. “I did
not
see a dog. There was
somebody
on that shore yesterday. A little dark-haired girl in a brown dress.” The look in Sheila’s eyes dared anybody to offer up the dog theory again. “You know, it’s up to citizens to keep an eye out, and law enforcement” – she gave me a pointed stare – “ought to respect that. What about that case that was on TV, where that man kidnapped a little girl and held her prisoner in his backyard for almost twenty years? Concerned citizens saw things going on at that house, but none of it was ever investigated. It’s just the kind of thing that happens.”

“You oughta help Reverend Hay with his next theater production, down at the Tin Building, Sheila.” Nester turned back to the domino game. “You got a flare for the dramatic.”

Snorting, Sheila smacked a hand on the counter and turned away, quitting the conversation.

“I saw a truck . . . a gray Ford with a dog in the back and a little dark-haired girl in the passenger seat,” someone offered from over by the door.

All three of us swiveled around, and there was Dustin’s mom. I’d forgotten all about her, which was good, since this morning’s meeting hadn’t come out too shiny.

Sheila jumped on the new information. “You did? Where? When?”

Dustin’s mom took a few more steps across the room, a little wrinkle in her nose as she eyeballed Dorsey’s collection of wall-mounted fish and stuffed wildlife.“Yesterday. Somewhere up in Chinquapin Peaks.” Motioning vaguely toward the hills, she walked past me like I wasn’t there, on her way to talk to Sheila.

I watched her pass by. Nester caught my eye and pointed behind her back, his mouth circling in a silent whistle and his eyes wide, like,
Look ’a-there, Mart, a real, live g-i-r-l.

I made out like I didn’t notice – Nester or the girl.

“I was out on the other side of the lake yesterday afternoon, and my car broke down,” she told Sheila. “The truck went by, and it was all just very . . . odd.” She introduced herself to Sheila, and the name clicked in my memory. Andrea. Andrea Henderson.

Sheila shook her hand. “Oh, so you’re Dustin’s mom. Sorry we were in such a rush when you picked him up. One minute I heard someone coming in the door, and by the time I finished with the bus customers, Dustin was gone.”

“My sister came to get him, actually,” Andrea said. A flash of emotion crossed her face, but she smoothed it away, just as quick.This woman was cool as an icehouse latch, when she wanted to be. “I hated that I couldn’t be here to help sort things out. Yesterday was pretty crazy. About the time Dustin was . . . AWOL on the lake, I was trying to get myself out of the backwoods with a flat tire. While I was stuck there, a gray truck came by with a seriously nasty dog chained in the back. There was an old man behind the wheel, and a little girl in the passenger seat. She turned around and looked at me when they passed. The driver stopped, and I thought he was going to get out and help me, but he didn’t. He just drove away.”

Sheila flashed a sneer my way, as in,
Mart, I told you that old man
was up to something.

In the booth, Nester perked up, sensing a topic that’d be even more interesting than the day’s fishing report. “Was the truck all rusted up? Did it have a old greasy-haired man in a blue ball cap drivin’ it?”

Andrea described Len and his truck to a T– right down to Len’s dry-rotted ball cap and the way his truck wheezed and belched like a chain smoker gasping for air. Tired or not, my interest level went up.

“The whole thing gave me goose bumps at the time. I didn’t quite . . .” She paused, her gaze taking in a stuffed bobcat with a quail in its mouth, her lip curling on one side. “I didn’t quite know what to make of it, but I was busy trying to figure out how to change a tire.” Her mouth twitched at the corners, like the memory was funny now. Guess she did have a sense of humor, after all. “But sometimes you get just a base-level reaction, and you don’t pay too much attention right then, but it bothers you later, you know? It bothered me that the little girl was a mess, dirty and unkempt, and that she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. I just brushed it off as a grandparent who didn’t know the laws, or didn’t take time to buckle her in.”

Nester rolled a narrow look at me, then turned back to Andrea. “That’d be Len, all right. But he ain’t nobody’s grandpa. Len’s never had a family. He went off to Vietnam right after high school. Got shrapnel in his head. He wasn’t no Rhodes Scholar before that, but after, he come home and lived with his mama and daddy, and they took care of him. But they been dead quite a while, I reckon. Nobody’s seen either one of them in years. Len probably dug a hole and buried them up there in the hills. That man’s simple as a mudbug and smells twice as bad. Mart, there’s no way some woman would be getting with him and makin’ babies.” Nester leaned back and frowned at me, concerned.

A question came to my mind, and I just went ahead and asked Andrea. “What were you doing up on the other side of the lake? That’s pretty remote territory.” It wasn’t like me to be interested in other people’s business. Normally, I was happy to let them keep theirs and I’d keep mine. Simpler that way. But I had to admit that all of a sudden, I was curious about Dustin’s mom. I couldn’t quite put a finger on why that was. In some way or other, Andrea Henderson just didn’t add up.