Mason laughed. “Won’t need a recipe for that Missy. All you’ve got to do is take care of my baby boy, here.”
I thought, huh. Felt the love in his words.
Sandy excused herself to the ladies room. “That’s one you don’t let get away, Son.”
“I know, Dad. I know. This one’s going to work. Meant to be, you know?”
“That I do, Son,” Mason said. He was marking a series of cut lines on the boards with a carpenter’s pencil. He didn’t look up when he spoke, but it didn’t stop the words. “You know, Virg, you and I, sometimes it sort of seems like neither one of us has the right words to say to each other. You ever feel like that?”
“Yeah, I guess sometimes I do, Dad.”
Mason put the old board on top of the new one and traced the cut points out. “My dad, your grandfather, he wasn’t much of a talker. I used to get mad at him when I was a kid because he wouldn’t say anything to me except to correct me when I did something wrong. It wasn’t until you were born that I finally figured out how much he loved me. Wasn’t until he died that I figured out how much I loved him, faults and all.”
I sat there with that for a minute and in the silence Sandy came back out and stood next to me. Then, as if she could sense the conversation, her eyes met with mine. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” she asked.
Neither my father or I had a chance to answer. The front door of the bar opened and someone stepped inside, just past the entryway. My dad looked up. “Bar’s closed for renovations,” he said. “Be open again next week.”
I heard my father say we were closed, but when I turned to look behind me at whoever was at the door my foot slipped a little on the brass railing under the stool, then got caught there between the railing and the bar. I cursed, then gently tried to twist my leg back into position. Just as I did, I heard my father say the last words that would ever come out of his mouth.
“Gun!”
When I turned my head toward the sound of his voice I saw Sandy reach for her weapon, then felt myself being pulled to the floor.
Sandy had grabbed the back of my shirt collar and pulled me toward her and onto the ground. Later, she would tell me she yelled something, but could not remember what it was. I never heard the words she spoke, but I did hear the gunfire right next to my ear. Sandy fired twice, but Amanda Pate managed to get one shot off.
And one was enough.
I couldn’t hear anything, the sound of the gunshots booming in my ears. The cordite from the spent shells assaulted my nostrils like someone had stuffed fire ants in my nose. I turned on the ground and the pain in my leg made the room swim out of focus for a moment, but I saw Sandy kick a gun from Amanda’s dead hand, then saw her move back toward me. She was yelling something, I don’t know what, but when our eyes locked and she saw I was okay, she ran right past me to the other side of the bar. I tried to get up, but my leg was caught in the railing, the cast wedged in tight. I finally managed to pull it free and when I did, I felt something pull loose and a wave of pain swam through me and everything seemed to turn gray, as if I were watching an old black and white film.
I could hear Sandy on the other side of the bar. She kept repeating, ‘no, no, no,’ over and over. I called out to her.
“Virgil…Virgil, I need you back here.”
“Sandy?” I yelled back.
“Virgil, hurry. You better hurry.”
I hopped and slid along the bar, my bad leg trailing behind me. When I turned the corner I saw Sandy was covered in my father’s blood, his head in her lap. The bullet had caught him squarely in the chest at the bottom of his rib cage. The color had drained from his face, and blood ran from both corners of his mouth. Sandy had one arm wrapped around his body, holding him in place, her other hand pressed tight over the gaping wound in his chest. I could see his blood as it burst between her fingers with every beat of his heart, and from the time it took me to move from the end of the bar to where they lay, he had lost more blood than I thought the human body capable of containing.
I already had my cell phone out. I punched in 9-1-1, shouted our location into the phone and let it slip from my hand. I got down at my father’s side and put my hand on top of his wound as well. “Hang in there, Dad. You’re going to be alright. You’re going to make it. Help’s on the way, you hear me?” His eyes glanced off mine and I felt his hand reach out and grab my wrist. He tried to say something, but when he did, he choked on the blood that ran from his mouth and no words ever came. He took my hand and held it to his heart, then placed Sandy’s hand on top of mine, his gaze held firmly to hers. I watched him stare at Sandy and as I did, I saw his eyes go out of focus and felt the silence in his chest.
I looked at Sandy who held my father in her lap and knew she grieved in ways I would never be able to know. For her, it was summer again from long ago, and this was yet another goodbye of a father figure she would never have the chance to know or love.
After a while, I slid sideways and sat down next to her and ran my fingers through my father’s hair. The three of us sat there like that for a long time, but for how long, I was never really sure.
EPILOGUE
The sun was out, suspended high in the miracle of another day and it felt like everything was fresh and destined to live forever. I walked with a cane, a handmade hickory stick Sandy bought for me when the doctor removed my cast and said I could go without the crutches. When we walked across the still wet grass of an overnight rain, the tip of my cane sank into the ground in various spots and Sandy had to hold my arm to help steady me along.
It had been eight weeks since my father died.
In the end, I decided that my father’s death could only be attributed to a certain sense of bad luck and a failure of imagination on my part. Amanda Pate had pulled the strings on her husband for years as she lived with and hid from his desires, all while she served an agenda of her own. We were able to piece together certain facts, Amanda Pate and Sidney Wells, Jr. being lovers, chief among them. When that fell into place, eventually the rest did too.
The fire that killed Amy Frechette, Murton’s girlfriend, was traced back to Collins and Hicks by forensics and the hard work of the Arson squad. It was ultimately decided that it was nothing more than a way to draw Murton out into the open and it worked better than either Collins or Hicks would have liked, I’m sure. It took a number of weeks, but I was finally able to put the final piece of the puzzle in place, and when I did, I almost wished I’d left it alone.
I thought I knew the rest of the story. No, that’s not quite right. I did know the rest of the story, but I needed someone to confirm it for me. So I called the Governor on a Sunday morning at home and asked him to meet me at his office.
He resisted the idea of the meeting.
I insisted.
I let him get there ahead of me, and when I walked into his office he was seated at his desk, a glass of scotch in his hand. It was only ten-thirty in the morning. I limped in and sat down in one of the chairs in front of his desk. I didn’t say a word.
He watched me for a few minutes. Then he unlocked the center drawer of his desk and pulled out a brown expandable file folder. He set it flat on the desk, removed the elastic string from the flap and pulled out a number of different photographs and laid them on his desk. I couldn’t see the person in the photos, but I didn’t need to. “I should have known you would figure it out,” the Governor said. “Who else knows?”
“Sandy, and probably Murton Wheeler, though he hasn’t come right out and said so. But no one else that I’m aware of. My gut tells me you’ve probably confided in Bradley though.”
“Your gut tells you true. That makes five people in the entire world who know, Jonesy. You, Sandy, Murton,
