“You got two choices,” Stocky said to me. “One”-he held up a pudgy finger-“you show me your identification without any more back talk. Two”-yep, another chubby digit-“I arrest you for trespassing.”
None of this felt right. I glanced behind me at a tree and saw what looked like a security camera pointed down at us. I didn’t like this. I didn’t like this at all, but there was nothing to be gained by antagonizing a cop. I needed to keep my big mouth shut.
I started to reach into my pocket to get my wallet when Stocky held up a hand and said, “Steady. Slow down.”
“What?”
“Reach into your pocket, but make no sudden moves.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
So much for keeping my big mouth shut.
“Do I look like I’m kidding? Use two fingers. Your thumb and your index finger. Move slowly.”
My wallet was deep down in my front pocket. Extracting it with two fingers took longer than it should.
“I’m waiting,” he said.
“Give me a second.”
I finally got ahold of the wallet and handed it to him. He started to look through it, as though on a scavenger hunt. He stopped at my Lanford College ID, looked at the photograph, looked at me, then he frowned.
“This you?”
“Yes.”
“Jacob Fisher.”
“Everyone calls me Jake.”
He frowned down at my photograph.
“I know,” I said. “It is hard to capture my raw animal magnetism in photography.”
“You have a college ID in here.”
I didn’t hear a question so I didn’t answer one.
“You look kind of old to be a student.”
“I’m not a student. I’m a professor. See where it says ‘staff’?”
Thin Man came back from the car. He shook his head. I guessed that meant the license plate check came back negative.
“Why would a big-time professor be coming up to our little town?”
I remembered something that I saw on television once. “I need to reach into my pocket again. That okay?”
“What for?”
“You’ll see.”
I pulled out my smartphone.
“What do you need that for?” Stocky asked.
I pointed it at him and hit the video record button. “This is on a live feed to my home computer, Officer.” That was a lie. It was only recording on my phone, but what the heck. “Everything you say and do can be seen by my colleagues.” More lies, but good ones. “I’d very much like to know why you need to see my identification and are asking so many questions about me.”
Stocky put the sunglasses back on as though that would mask the rage. He closed his lips so tight that they were quaking. He handed me back my wallet and said, “We had a complaint that you were trespassing. Despite finding you on a private property and listening to some story about a retreat that doesn’t exist, we decided to let you off with just a warning. Please leave these premises. Have a nice day.”
Stocky and Thin Man headed back to their squad car. They sat in the front and waited until I was back in mine. There was no other play here. I got into my car and drove away.
Chapter 8
I didn’t go far.
I drove to the village of Kraftboro. If it had a big, sudden influx of new construction and cash, it might raise itself to the level of small-town America. It looked like something out of an old movie. I half expected to see a barbershop quartet in straw hats. There was a general store (the sign actually said GENERAL STORE), an old “stone mill” with an unmanned “visitor’s center,” a gas station that also housed a one-chair barbershop, and a bookstore café. Natalie and I had spent a lot of time in that bookstore café. It was small, so there wasn’t much browsing, but there was a corner table and Natalie and I would sit there and read the paper and sip coffee. Cookie, a baker who’d escaped the big city, used to run the place with her partner, Denise. She always played Redemption’s Son by Joseph Arthur or Damien Rice’s O, and after a while, Natalie and I started thinking of those-gag alert-as “our” albums. I wondered whether Cookie was still there. Cookie baked what Natalie considered the greatest scones in the history of the world. Then again, Natalie loved all scones. I, on the other hand, still have trouble differentiating scones from dry, rock-hard bread.
See? We had our differences.
I parked down the road and started journeying up the same path I had stumbled down six years earlier. The wooded trail ran for about a hundred yards. In the clearing I spotted the familiar white chapel on the edge of the property I had just been booted off. Some service or meeting was letting out. I watched the congregants blink their way back into the lowering sun. The chapel was, as far as I knew, nondenominational. It seemed more utilitarian, if you will, than Unitarian, a gathering place more than any sort of house of deeply religious worship.
I waited, smiling like I belonged, nodding like Mr. Friendly as about a dozen people walked past me and down the path. I checked the faces, but there was no one that I recognized from six years ago. No surprise really.
A tall woman with a severe hair bun waited by the chapel steps. I made my way over, maintaining the Mr. Friendly smile.
“May I help you?” she asked.
Good question. What did I hope to find here? It wasn’t as though I had a plan.
“Are you looking for Reverend Kelly?” she asked. “Because he’s not around right now.”
“Do you work here?” I asked.
“Sort of. I’m Lucy Cutting, the registrar. It’s a volunteer position.”
I stood there.
“Is there something I can help you with?”
“I don’t know how to put this…,” I began. And then: “Six years ago I attended a wedding here. I knew the bride, but not the groom.”
Her eyes narrowed a bit, more curious than wary. I pushed ahead.
“Anyway, I recently saw an obituary for a man named Todd. That was the groom’s name. Todd.”
“Todd is a fairly common name,” she said.
“Yes, of course, but there was also a photograph of the deceased. It looked like, I know how this sounds, but it looked like the same man I saw marry my friend. The problem is, I never learned Todd’s last name so I don’t know if it is him or not. And if it is, well, I’d like to pay my respects.”
Lucy Cutting scratched her cheek. “Can’t you just call?”
“I wish I could, but no.” I was going with honesty here. It felt good. “For one thing I don’t know where Natalie-that’s the bride’s name-I don’t know where she lives now. She changed her last name to his, I think. So I can’t find them. And also, to be completely up-front, I had a past with this woman.”
“I see.”
“So if the man I saw in the obituary wasn’t her husband-”
“Your communication might be unwanted,” she finished for me.
“Exactly.”
She thought about that. “And if it was her husband?”
I shrugged. She scratched her cheek some more. I tried to look nonthreatening, even demure, which really doesn’t play on a guy my size. I almost batted my eyelashes.
“I wasn’t here six years ago,” she said.
“Oh.”
“But we can check the schedule books. They’ve always kept immaculate records-every wedding, baptism, communion, bris, whatever.”
Bris? “That would be great.”
She led me down the steps. “Do you remember the date of the wedding?”
I did, of course. I gave her the exact date.
We reached a small office. Lucy Cutting opened a file cabinet, thumbed through it, and pulled out one of those accounting books. As she flipped through it, I could see that she was right. The records were immaculate. There was a column for the date, type of event, participants, start and end times-all written in handwriting that could double as calligraphy.
“Let’s see what we can find here…”
She made a production of putting on her reading glasses. She licked her index finger schoolmarm-like, flipped a few more pages, and found the one she wanted. The same finger started tracing down the page. When she frowned, I thought to myself, Uh-oh…