I nodded. “Maybe so. So be careful who you trust. Bad guys lie through their teeth. But bugs?” I pointed to the bloated face and the telltale maggots. “You can always believe them. Whatever they tell you, it’s the truth.”
Chapter 2
The familiar arc of a rib cage filled my field of vision as I leaned down and peered through the smoke. On the rack of my charcoal grill, two slabs of baby back ribs sizzled, the meat crusting a lovely reddish brown. Ribs were a rare treat these days — Kathleen, invoking her Ph.D. in nutrition, had drastically cut our meat consumption when my cholesterol hit 220—but she was willing to bend the dietary rules on special occasions. And surely this, our thirtieth wedding anniversary, counted as a special occasion.
As soon as the FBI training at the Body Farm had ended, I’d headed for home, stopping by the Fresh Market, an upscale grocery, to procure the makings of a feast, southern style: ribs, potato salad, baked beans, and coleslaw.
As I fitted the lid back onto the smoker, I heard a car pull into the driveway, followed by the opening and slamming of four doors and the clamor of four voices. A moment later the backyard gate opened, and Jeff, my son, came in. Leaning into the column of smoke roiling upward, he drew a deep, happy breath. “Smells great. Almost done?”
“Hope so. The guest of honor should be home any minute. She’s been dropping hints all week about celebrating at the Orangery.” The Orangery was Knoxville’s fanciest restaurant. “Way I see it, only way to dodge that bullet is to have dinner on the table when she gets here.”
“You know,” he said, “it wouldn’t kill you to take Mom someplace with cloth napkins and real silverware once every thirty years.”
I raised my eyebrows in mock surprise. “You got something against the plastic spork? Anyhow, I thought it’d be nicer to celebrate here.”
The wooden gate swung open again — burst open, whapping against the fence — and Tyler came tearing into the backyard, with all the exuberance of a five-year-old who’d just been liberated from a car seat. “Grandpa Bill, Grandpa Bill, I could eat a horse,” he announced, wrapping himself around my left leg.
A few steps behind came his younger brother, Walker, age three, grabbing my right leg and crowing, “I can eat a elephant!”
Jeff’s wife, Jenny — a pretty, willowy blonde, who carried herself with the easy grace of an athlete — came up the steps after them, closing the gate. “Stay away from the grill, boys,” she called. “It’s hot. Very, very hot.” She leaned over the boys to give me a peck on the cheek. “I don’t know about the ribs, but you smell thoroughly smoked,” she said. “Are you sure you want us horning in on your anniversary dinner?”
“Absolutely. What better way to celebrate thirty years of marriage?”
“Hmm,” Jeff grunted. “Hey, how ’bout you and Mom celebrate with the boys while Jenny and I eat at the Orangery?”
“Listen to Casanova,” scoffed Jenny. “For our anniversary, he took me to the UT-Vanderbilt game. Superromantic.” She shook her head good-naturedly. Then, with characteristic helpfulness, she asked, “What needs doing?”
“If you could set the table, that’d be great. Oh, and maybe put the slaw and potato salad and beans in something better looking than those plastic tubs?”
She nodded. “Hey, kiddos, who wants to be Mommy’s helper?”
“I do, I do,” they both shouted, abandoning me to follow her through the sliding glass door and into the kitchen.
“What on earth did you do to deserve her?” I asked Jeff as the door slid shut.
“I think she likes me for the foil effect,” he said. “I make her look so good by comparison. Same reason Mom keeps you around.”
At that moment I heard the quick toot of a car horn in the driveway, followed by the clatter of the garage door opening. Kathleen was home.
Soon after, delighted squeals—“Grandmommy! Grandmommy!”—announced her arrival in the kitchen.
The slider rasped open and she emerged, the strap of her leather briefcase still slung over her shoulder. “Bill Brockton, you sneak. You didn’t tell me you were cooking.”
“I wanted to surprise you.”
“I wanted to surprise you, too,” she said. “I made us a seven o’clock reservation at the Orangery.”
“Oh, darn — I wish I’d known,” I said. She shot me a dubious look, which I countered with an innocent smile. “That would’ve been nice, honey. But I guess you’d better call and cancel.”
“I’ll call,” she said, “but I won’t cancel; I’ll reschedule, for Saturday night. You don’t get off the hook that easily. If I can survive thirty years of Cracker Barrel vittles, one fancy French dinner won’t kill you.”
She turned and headed inside. The instant the sliding-glass door closed, Jeff and I looked at each other and burst into laughter.
Dinner was loud, rowdy, and wonderful, with three terrible puns (all of them mine), two brotherly squabbles, and one spilled drink (also mine). The ribs were a hit — smoky, succulent, and tender.
Sitting at the head of the kitchen table, I surveyed my assembled family, then, with my sauce-smeared knife, I tapped the side of my iced-tea glass. “A toast,” I said. The three adults looked at me expectantly; the two boys gaped as if I were addled.
“Toast?” said Walker. “Toast is breakfast, silly.”
“A toast,” Jenny explained, “is also a kind of blessing. Or a thank-you. Or a wish.”
Walker’s face furrowed, then broke into a smile. “I toast we get a dog!” His toast drew laughs from Kathleen and me, and nervous, noncommittal smiles from his parents.
“A toast,” I repeated. “To my lovely wife. To thirty wonderful years together.”
We clinked glasses all around. Kathleen looked into my eyes and smiled but then, to my surprise, she teared up. “To this lovely moment,” she said, her voice quavering, “and this lovely family. The family that almost wasn’t.”
Now I felt my own eyes brimming. We almost never spoke of it, but none of us — Kathleen, Jeff, Jenny, or I — would ever forget the near miss to which she was alluding. The grown-ups clinked glasses again — somberly this time — and Kathleen reached out to me with her right hand. Instead of clasping hands, though, she bent her pinky finger, hooked it around mine, and squeezed. It was our secret handshake, of sorts: our reminder of what a sweet life we had, and how close — how terribly close — we’d come to losing it, right in this very room, right at this very table, a dozen years before. I lifted her hand to my face and uncrooked her finger, tracing the scar around the base and then giving it a kiss. By now the scar was a faint, thin line — barely visible and mostly forgotten, except when something triggered memories of that nightmarish night, and that evil man: Satterfield, sadistic killer of women. Satterfield, emerging from our basement, gun in hand, to bind us — Kathleen, Jeff, me, and even Jenny, Jeff’s girlfriend at the time — to the kitchen chairs. Satterfield, putting Kathleen’s finger into the fishlike jaws of a pair of gardening shears, and closing the jaws in a swift, bloody bite.
Odd, how memories can open underfoot, in the blink of an eye, taking you down a rabbit hole of the mind to some subterranean, subconscious universe where different rules of time and space and logic hold sway. Part of me remained sitting at the table, my fingers smeared with barbecue sauce, but part of me had gone down that bloody rabbit hole.