Heaven Preserve Us (35 page)

"Lord love a duck. Will you just say it, whatever it is?"

He nodded. Paused. Opened his mouth to speak.

A flashing cacophony bore down on us from behind. I twisted around
to see what was going on as Barr quickly pulled to the side of the road.
The screaming sirens and blaring horn nearly deafened us as they passed,
and I put my palms over my ears like a little kid. One after another they raced by: an ambulance, a fire truck and a Sheriff's vehicle, all nose to tail
and heading toward Cadyville at engine-roaring speed.

As soon as they were past us, Barr floored it. His personal car, a normally sedate white Camry, left rubber on the shoulder of the highway,
and we trailed closely behind the emergency entourage.

"What are you doing?" I shouted over the din.

"Finding out what's going on. Whatever it is, it's not good."

A thrill ran through me. I watched, wide-eyed, as Barr maneuvered
around traffic at high speed. I grabbed the edge of the door and tried not
to grin. I should have been scared, but it was kind of fun.

Even if he was avoiding the issue, which I knew darn well he was.

What had he been going to tell me?

Someone honked as we veered around them. Barr ignored them. In
another mile we rounded a curve and discovered the reason for all the
emergency equipment. My urge to smile quickly retreated. Ahead, a car
had left the road and traveled fifty feet before crashing head-on into a
telephone pole. Dark smoke rose from the vehicle, and uniformed personnel ran toward it.

We parked behind the Sheriff's SUV. Then I saw the light bar on top
of the wrecked car. The logo on the side.

I turned to Barr. "Oh, my God."

His door was open, and he was halfway out of the car, looking grim.
"It's one of ours," he said.

I scrambled out and down the shallow ditch embankment behind
him, falling behind as the slick soles of my flip-flops slid around on the
long grass. More grass poked at my legs, bare below the knee. Then I hit
brown dirt and was able to run at full speed.

When I reached him, Barr held his arm out, preventing my further
approach. A cloud of chemicals whooshed from a fire extinguisher as
someone emptied it all over the engine compartment. The black smoke
stopped. Peering around Barr, I could see the driver's door was open to show part of a man's foot, but then he turned and walked me backward,
away from the scene.

"Who is it?" I asked, breathless. "Why aren't they trying to get him
out?"

He stopped and closed his eyes. When he opened them, I knew it was
really, really bad.

"It's Scott," he said. "He's dead."

"Oh, no," I said. And again, "Oh, no. Who'll tell Chris?" I knew Scott's
wife better than I knew him. We were both members of the Cadyville Regional Artist's Co-op, or CRAG, a somewhat recent addition to our little
town's growing artsy-artsy scene.

Barr nodded toward a rapidly approaching pickup. It skidded to a
stop on the highway, and Chris Popper got out. She stared toward the
wrecked patrol car, hand over her mouth.

He said, "She has a scanner."

Together, we hurried back across the field to Officer Popper's wife.

"Slow down. It isn't a race," Ruth Black said. "Spinning yarn is about
process as much as result."

I reduced the speed with which I was pumping the treadle on the
spinning wheel. "Sorry. I guess I'm bleeding off some nervous energy."

"Oh, I don't doubt it, after what happened to Scott Popper last evening. But that's the beauty of it," she said. "I find spinning allows me to
let go of all the other stuff in my life for a while."

Maybe that was why she did it so much. And why I was rapidly becoming obsessed with spinning fiber into yarn. Today Ruth was teaching
me how to take the two spools of single-ply yarn I'd gradually managed
to make over the last three weeks, and spin them together to create a two-ply yarn. A short and spry seventy, Ruth wore her crop of white hair
spiked to within an inch of its life. She leaned close, head bent as she
watched me work. Her claim to fame at CRAG was fiber art. I'd always
known she was an inveterate knitter but had only realized since joining
the co-op that she was also an expert in spinning, weaving, felting, and
crochet.

"Now, see how your yarn is getting too much twist in it? When you
ply the yarns together, you need to make sure the wheel is spinning the
opposite direction from the one you used to spin the singles. The first
way gives it an "S" twist. The second utilizes a "Z" twist so the yarn unspins just slightly as the two strands twine together."

"Um. Okay." I stopped the wheel and tried it the other way. "This is
hard after spinning in the other direction all this time."

"You'll get used to it."

The jingling of the bell over the door signaled a possible customer,
and Ruth and I both half-stood to see over the cashier's counter. We were
watching the retail shop on the ground floor of CRAG. It was ten in the
morning, and upstairs the supply area and co-op studio spaces were still
empty.

Ruth had invited me to join about six weeks before. I'd protested
that the handmade soap and toiletries I manufactured for my business, Winding Road Bath Products, hardly counted as art, but the other
members insisted they did. In truth, they needed as many participants as
possible to generate momentum for the co-op. Chris Popper, who had
bought the old library and renovated it as a place for artists of all kinds
to make and sell their creations, had been quite enthusiastic about adding me to their roster.

The bell hadn't announced customers, but three of the core members of the co-op. First through the door was Irene Nelson. Mousy. There
was just no other word for Irene. Thin hair, colorless eyes, nondescript
features, wearing beige on beige on beige. I had yet to hear her say more than a dozen words in a row, though I saw her nearly every time I came
to the co-op. Her sculptures were what I thought of as "menopause
art"-lots of chunky naked women shown in varying positions of prayer
and/or power. We are women, hear us sing.

Next was Jake Beagle, a doctor who looked like a lumberjack. He specialized in family medicine, which is to say that he didn't really specialize
in anything at all. I suspected Jake's real passion lay in the nature photography he considered a hobby. He was certainly talented. But art didn't
help pay the bills, and though I'd never met her, I had heard that Jake's
second wife, Felicia, ran up quite a few bills for him to pay.

Then came Ariel Skylark: blonde, small-boned, tan and supple as
only a twenty-three-year-old can be. She had big brown eyes, full lips,
and a bizarre winsomeness that men seemed to find irresistible. Her
oversized canvases, all of which sported untidy splotches of black and
white and red paint, took up most of one wall of the co-op.

The only missing member of the core group was Chris. Barr and I
had managed to get her home the evening before, and Jake had come
over, as both friend and doctor. He said he'd prescribe something to help
her sleep, but she had refused to call anyone to stay with her.

The bell jingled again, and Irene's son, Zak, trailed in, all elbows and
knees ranging under long, stringy dark hair and a lovely arrangement
of hoops piercing his lips and nostrils. He managed to look bored and
uncomfortable at the same time.

Zak and Jake both seemed hyperaware of their spatial relationship to
Ariel, situating themselves near her, but not touching. Irene watched her
son's antics with a look of unadulterated disgust. I was surprised that he
didn't seem to notice. Ariel did though, and smiled broadly at Irene, who
turned quickly away.

"I just checked in on Chris," Jake said.

"How is she?" I asked.

"Holding up. It's hard," he said.

"She knows we're all here for her," Irene said.

Ariel waved her hand in the air. "Oh, she'll be fine. My parents died
when I was sixteen, and I'm okay."

We all stared at her.

"What? I'm just saying, people get over stuff, you know? It doesn't
help anyone to make it into a big deal."

"Time is indeed a great healer," Ruth said, ever the diplomat.

Wow. I mean, some people call me insensitive and tactless, but those
people had apparently never met Miss Ariel.

"Sophie Mae, watch your tension," Ruth said, and I turned my attention back to my yarn.

SCOTT POPPER LOOKED GOOD dead.

I mean, he looked good when he was alive, too, but the nice folks at
Crane's Funeral Home really did a fantastic job. Crashing his car into a
telephone pole at high speed could hardly have been kind to his face, but
two days later here he was, open casket and all, looking just as handsome
as ever.

And only a bit less animated than usual.

Now, that was mean, wasn't it. I'd spent little time around Scott, and
even that in fairly large groups. That's hardly enough to be able to form
a studied opinion regarding someone's social skills. Maybe he wasn't always as dull as he'd been in my presence. Maybe he was just shy. Even if
they don't always deserve it, I do try to give the dead the benefit of the
doubt.

In the pew beside me, Barr's attention flicked from funeral attendee
to funeral attendee, ever watchful out of habit, more than any other reason. Scott lay in peaceful repose at the front of the room. Low music
seeped out of speakers hidden behind tapestries in the apse of St. Luke's Catholic Church, the droning organ underscoring whispered voices and
the rustle of clothing as people settled into their seats. The warm June air
smelled of greenery and Murphy's Oil Soap. I eyed the gleaming wood
pews. It must take hours to wipe them all down.

I sighed inwardly. This probably wasn't the best time to ask Barr what
he'd been going to tell me before Scott's accident. I watched him out
of the corner of my eye, admiring how he looked in his dress uniform
while trying not to look obvious. I loved how his chestnut-colored hair
was streaked gray at his temples, how his slightly hooked nose looked in
profile, how his dark brown eyes could be warm and inviting when he
looked at me but hard as obsidian when the occasion called for it.

Barr frequently darted looks at Scott up in the glossy walnut casket,
then jerked his gaze away as if it were painful to look upon the dead for
long. His eyes rested on Scott's wife, and the muscles of his jaw slackened; he'd been clenching his teeth. Raw pity flashed across his face for a
moment, then was gone, replaced with a mask of easy-going stoicism.

I touched his arm. He squeezed my hand in return.

Chris was a decorative blacksmith. You probably don't have to be a bigboned, muscular gal in order to form the elaborate metal pieces that she
created, but it couldn't hurt. Nearing six feet in height, shoulders like a linebacker, muscles rippled down her arms, fully exposed in the black sheath
she wore to her husband's funeral. Her straight, peanut-butter-blonde hair,
parted in the middle, hung lank on either side of her wide cheekbones, framing an expressionless face that was notable more for its precise symmetry
than for classic beauty. Her blue eyes stared forward, unseeing.

Remembering how I'd felt when I'd attended my own husband's
funeral almost six years previously, I could understand the confused
numbness that must have been swamping her. My heart ached with empathy. At least with Mike's lymphoma, I'd had a little time-far too little
time, but still-to prepare for his death. But dying in a car accident is a
sneak robbery, an unexpected blow to those left behind, for which there is no preparation. Suddenly, the rest of Chris Popper's life looked different than she ever could have imagined.

She was surrounded by Ruth Black, Irene and Zak Nelson, and Jake
Beagle. Jake's wife, Felicia, coifed and dressed to the nines, stood a little
ways away, talking with Ruth's ninety-year-old Uncle Thaddeus.