Goose in the Pond - Earlene Fowler [35]
“I left her at the library at six o’clock. She knew the lockdown procedure and she had some stuff she said she wanted to work on in the computer lab. It was really against the rules, but Jillian’s pretty relaxed about that kind of stuff. We’d done it lots of times. We were supposed to have breakfast together the next morning.” His voice cracked again. “If I’d only stayed. If I’d—“
“Nick, don’t beat yourself up. There’s no way you could have known.” The path he was walking down was one way too familiar to me. That overwhelming, but entirely false feeling that somehow, if we’d just done things differently, we could have changed fate and prevented the tragedy. “I’m so sorry,” I said again.
He just nodded and closed the door behind me without answering.
On the drive to the folk-art museum I castigated myself for even bringing up the investigation. Some friend I was. But Grace was my friend, too, and I didn’t want her and Roy to be hurt by this either. We’d become pretty close in the few months we’d exercised, trained, and doctored her horses together. Going to the stables three or four times a week eased somewhat my homesickness for daily ranch life. Our small rented house didn’t allow pets, so playing with Grace’s dogs and helping with her animals had become a welcomed respite to this new life in town that deep down I couldn’t believe was permanent.
I pulled into the museum parking lot and parked in my habitual spot under a huge oak tree whose dark gray trunk was crisscrossed with tree scars professing various undying loves and the nineties equivalent of “Kilroy was here.” The parking lot was jammed with vehicles, and there was a corresponding amount of frantic activity in the neighboring field. The barbed-wire fencing normally separating the pasture from our parking lot had been temporarily removed, so I walked straight into the field, waving at different local merchants as they decorated their booths for the festival. In the center of the field D-Daddy was supervising a group of boisterous college boys unloading hay bales from a new Ford pickup.
We were providing three storytelling areas—the main one in the center under a rented canopy, which would have a plain wood backdrop and hay bales for seating, and two smaller areas, both under large, leafy oak trees. They would also have hay bales for seating, but the storytellers themselves would have to provide any backdrop—imaginative or otherwise. All of them were far enough from each other so one storyteller’s voice wouldn’t overshadow another. The workshops would be held at staggered times in the main room of the co-op studios.
“To the left,” D-Daddy yelled. “Left!” Three young men pushed the backdrop up. One kid wearing a peach-colored bowling shirt with WORLEY’S ELECTRICAL SUPPLY embroidered on back ran around and caught the teetering wall. They steadied it with long two-by-fours while trying to figure out how to add another brace to make it steady. “C’est ça,” D-Daddy said. “That’s it.”
“Everything’s looking great,” I said, walking up to him.
He pulled out a dark blue bandanna and wiped his perspiring face. “Told them boys in the wood shop two braces weren’t near enough. Guess they’ll listen next time. Everything’s close to done, you bet.”
“Gee, D-Daddy, what do you need me for?”
“To give light to the heavens, ange,” he said, giving me a toothy smile and gesturing skyward. His thick white pompadour glistened in the sunlight.
One of the kids struggling with the backdrop snorted loudly. D-Daddy snapped his long fingers and told him to get cracking or there’ d be no lunch for him come noon.
Inside the museum I walked through the exhibit, thankful again for D-Daddy’s unexpected presence in my life. The story quilts were all hung evenly and properly with the wooden clip hangers the woodworkers had recently made. On the other side of one of the freestanding walls in the main exhibit hall, I heard a voice singing softly “Jolie blonde, you steal my heart away” in that sweet lilting tempo