I hung up and hid behind a curtain, so I could check on Darius from time to time. I needn’t have bothered to hide. I could have been on the surface of the moon for all Darius cared. He was one big brown goose pimple in the chilly breeze as he danced around buck naked, telling the sky that we would have the wedding supper when she came.
I wondered what Darius would do when he ran out of verses.
I didn’t have to wait long. He switched to “Turkey in the Straw.” Darius was having a flashback to elementary school music class, I decided.
He scampered around to his own music with an impressive light-footedness for a staid middle-aged man.
I decided to call my husband.
“There’s a naked man in the backyard,” I said softly, because Darius had stopped singing and was hunting an imaginary deer.
“Anyone I know?” Martin’s voice was cautious. He wasn’t certain how seriously to take this.
“Darius Quattermain. The woodman.”
“I assume you’ve called the sheriff?”
“The car’s here now.” The official car had just pulled up my driveway. I nodded approvingly. The siren wasn’t on and the lights stopped flashing as I watched. “Jimmy Henske and Levon Suit,” I told Martin.
“Jimmy Henske, huh? Maybe I’d better come home.” And the phone was replaced firmly in its cradle. Martin has no high opinion of the sheriffs department in Sparling County, and Jimmy Henske, who is maybe twenty-five, gawky and diffident, has never inspired my husband with his competence.
But Jimmy’s a nice guy, and Levon Suit (who went to high school with me) is a very controlled deputy who is not only innately more intelligent than Jimmy, but five years more experienced. I remembered that Levon had dated one of Darius’s daughters when we were juniors.
I watched, fascinated, as Levon slowly approached Darius. I was a little surprised the deputy would brave walking right up to him-but then, it was completely obvious Darius wasn’t carrying a weapon. It appeared that Darius had killed the deer and resumed singing and dancing in celebration. In fact, he was so glad to see Levon that he grabbed Levon’s hands and capered off, and for a delirious minute or two Levon trotted right along with him.
With a patience that made me proud, the two deputies coaxed Darius into their car. Jimmy hurried back to pick up Darius’s clothes, which he tossed in the front seat.
“Yessir, we’ll sing along with you all the way into town,” Jimmy was saying earnestly as Martin parked beside the squad car. My husband emerged from the Mercedes looking, as he generally did, immaculate, prosperous, and handsome.
“Hey, Mr. Bartell!” Darius called happily, as Jimmy was shutting the car door. “I brought your wood!”
Martin stood on the covered sidewalk between our house and the garage and saw the pieces of oak scattered around the backyard, which we’d finally, expensively, had rolled and re-seeded to make it smooth and grassy. Quite a few divots had been ripped out of the turf by Darius’s impromptu log toss.
“Thanks a lot, Darius,” Martin said.
I came out after the squad car had departed, all three of the occupants singing away. I mentally filed away a decision to write a letter to Sheriff Padgett Lanier to commend Levon and Jimmy’s restraint and good sense.
Martin was shedding his suit coat and pulling on his own heavy gloves from the toolshed built into the back of the garage. He got the wheelbarrow, too.
Besides my heavy red cardigan, I was still wearing my work clothes, a long sleeveless denim dress over a red T-shirt, but Martin was setting such a good example that my inappropriate clothes were no excuse to be idle. I found my own gloves and helped out. As we worked, we speculated on this bizarre event, and whether Darius, though clearly not in his right mind, had actually broken a law by dancing naked in our yard.
“How was the library this morning?” Martin asked, after we’d stacked the last piece of wood. I stood back, feeling sweat bead on my forehead from the exertion though the air was bracingly chilly, and smiled at him. He knew I was happier now that I’d resumed part-time work at the Lawrenceton library.
“Sam decided patrons with overdue books would be more likely to return the books if they were called personally, rather than sent a postcard. This comes from him reading some study in a magazine, of course. So guess who got to make at least fifty phone calls this morning? Thank God for answering machines. I decided it wasn’t cheating to leave a message on the machine.” I watched Martin pull off his heavy gloves. “What about you?”
“I had my annual physical, followed by a morning-long meeting about implementing the new EPA regulations.” My husband Martin, who has a pirate gene stuck somewhere in his DNA, frequently gets frustrated with his job as vice president of manufacturing for Pan-Am Agra, an agricultural products company. He has not always done something so legitimate and safe.
“Sorry, honey.” I patted his shoulder sympathetically. We strolled back to return the things to our toolshed. Darius’s pickup and small trailer were still parked blocking my car in, halfway on the gravel and halfway on the grass; when I’d okayed that, I’d only expected him to be there for a little while. The ground had been nice and dry, but as I turned to go back into the house, big drops of rain began to patter down. We simultaneously thought of the truck making troughs in the softened dirt, and hurried back to check the cab of the truck.
Martin said a heartfelt and obscene word. The ignition was empty.
I looked in the passenger side. Perhaps Darius had just withdrawn the keys and tossed them on the seat to silence the little beeper that reminds you your keys are in the ignition. I do that occasionally, if I have to run back into the house for a minute or two.
“Look, Martin.” I pointed. But not at a set of keys.
Martin stuck his head in the door.
There was an open bottle of generic pain reliever, acetaminophen, on the seat.
Martin raised one eyebrow at me. “So?”
“He started acting so funny so fast, my first thought was that he’d taken a drug. And I don’t think he’s the kind of man who would ever think of doing something so dangerous.”
Martin said, “We’d better call the sheriff’s department again.”
So once again Jimmy and Levon drove the mile out of town that got them to our house, and Jimmy pulled on plastic gloves before he picked up the pill bottle. He poured its contents onto the gloved palm of his other hand. He didn’t tell us to leave, so we watched.
Martin saw it first. He pointed.
Levon bent over Jimmy’s palm.
“Damn,” he said in his deep voice.
One of the pills was a smidge smaller than the others, and not quite the same shade of white. It didn’t have the manufacturer’s initial on it as all the other pain relief tablets did. The difference was obvious when you were looking for it. But without some good reason to examine the medicine, who would think of doing so?
“We got another one,” Jimmy concluded, looking down at Levon.
“Someone else has been drugged?” I asked, trying to keep my voice casual and sort of insinuate the question.
“Yes’m,” Jimmy said, not catching the warning look Levon was trying to send him. “Lady last week left her purse in the cart in the grocery while she walked over to the frozen section to get some Ore-Ida hash browns. When she was driving home, she took a pill from a fancy case in her purse, that she used to carry her-well, some prescription medicine-with her. Instead of getting tranquil, she went nuts.”
“What did she do?” I asked, fascinated.
“Well…”Jimmy began, treating me to a grin that told me the story was going to be a good one.
“We need to be getting this back to SPACOLEC,” Levon said pointedly.
“Huh? Oh, right.” Jimmy, aware he’d been on the verge of indiscretion, flushed to the roots of his reddish hair. “When one of Darius’s kids shows up, we’ll tell them you’d appreciate them moving the truck. The keys were in Darius’s pants. I coulda brought ‘em out here, if you’d mentioned them over the phone.”
I flushed guiltily. I’d been so excited over finding the pills, I had forgotten why we’d looked in Darius’s truck in the first place.
I watched as their car turned out of our long driveway and began the short stretch into Lawrenceton, piqued that I hadn’t gotten to hear the rest of Jimmy’s story. I wondered if my friend Sally Allison, a reporter for our local
