“I don’t know,” Thompson said, reaching out to toy with the lid of another drum of acetone, “But my instinct tells me that the rest of these chemical drums will give us the answer.”

  Before Eve could say anything, Thompson had flipped out a short, heavy-bladed knife and was busy wrenching the top of the next five-gallon drum. The sealed lid gave way with a suckering pop, and Thompson fell back, overturning the next bucket by accident.

  More pill bottles fell out, scattering across the floor. One of them rolled to a stop against Eve's boot. She stooped down and picked it up, studying the label.

  “Eloise Burgess?” Eve read the name out, giving her partner a quizzical look. “Who’s that?”

  “I don’t know,” Thompson shrugged, “Whoever she is, she’d better watch out. Things didn’t turn out so good for Selma.”

  “I think we’d better look her up first thing in the morning,” Eve said. Thompson nodded.

  “Good call.”

  “Hey, try the next drum. Maybe we can compile a list of names to turn up. If this is some kind of drug ring, I’ll bet somebody knew Selma.”

  “You got it,” Thompson said, opening her knife again and going to work.

  In the next three drums, the agents found pill bottles, filled and empty, with printed labels for Gerry Hughes, Linda Burkhardt, and Tommy Pepitone. The fourth drum turned up something new.

  “Aha!” Eve said triumphantly as she reached down into the drum, “Bingo.”

  The thing she pulled from the dry acetone drum was a small printing device equipped with a full, albeit miniature, qwerty keyboard and a roll of blank Rx label tape. Alongside it, in the drum, she found extra rolls of labels, empty pill bottles stacked together, and a spiral-bound notebook.

  “Well, well, well,” Thompson said, reaching into the drum and pulling out the notebook, “Looks like we found what Cartwright was looking for.” She thumbed through the notebook, frowning.

  “What’s in the memo pad?” Eve asked, diverting her attention away from the tiny digital typewriter in her hands.

  “I can’t say,” Thompson said, turning the notebook this way and that in her hands, “It’s written in some kind of code. Based on everything else we found, though, I’d guess it’s the client list and financial records of the little illegal pharma operation they’ve got going on back here.”

  “Good guess,” Eve said, “That book plus the pill bottles with the victim’s name on the label should be enough to pressure Cartwright into talking. Even if he’s not responsible for Selma’s death, I’d bet my last nickel he knows more about it than he’s admitted.”

  ***

  “I’m glad to see your ankle is healing up,” Eve said with loud, plastic friendliness in her voice as she entered the hospital room. Cartwright jerked awake with a grunt of panic, then caught his breath as he remembered where he was.

  “The doctors say you should be up and hobbling around in the next few days,” Eve went on, approaching the hospital bed to which the suspect was still fettered. “Won’t that be nice? You’ll be walking in time for your trial. You’re going to plead guilty, right? Maybe you’re even dreaming about a plea deal?”

  It was a little past three in the morning. The moon shone in a sliver crescent through a gap in the clouds outside the hospital window. The man in the rollaway gurney struggled to gain his bearings.

  “What?” he stammered thickly, blinking his eyes rapidly as the agent walked slowly up towards his head. “What are you talking about?”

  “Come on, Floyd,” Eve said in a soothing voice, “It’s over. We know everything now.”

  “You know nothing,” he sneered.

  "Once," Eve admitted, "But now we've got you. We turned your little shed upside down. It didn't take us too long to find the pill stashes. It was a clever plan. Let me see if I got it straight. You buy the drugs wholesale. They're pharma pills, so you probably get them coming down from Canada, not up from Mexico. You recruit customers from the Lion's Hill Sunbather's Club, take their names and pharmaceutical pill orders down in a little black memo book, and fill their prescriptions while they lounge on the patio. It's neat and easy, just like poolside drink service. You probably netted a few G's a week, right? Except last week, you hit a little snag, didn't you?"

  “Woah, hold on now.” The man in the hospital bed tried to hold up his hands defensively, but they were still locked to the bedframe. He struggled pathetically in his chains for a moment, then let his hands rest by his side with a defeated sigh. “I’m not admitting anything until I see my lawyer.”

  “That could be a while,” Eve said, “And we’ve already got plenty. For example, I know that Selma Vishni was one of your regular customers. I know you fed her Xanax on a bi-weekly refill plan.”

  “Bi-weekly?” the man shot back with an arrogant sneer, “Where the hell did you get that?”

  Eve smiled at him without speaking as Cartwright realized his mistake.

  “Shit,” the man cursed under his breath.

  “Save us all a little time, Floyd,” Eve said, “The more you help us now, the better you look when your sorry ass ends up in front of the judge.”

  The man clenched his mouth shut, avoiding Eve’s face.

  "Is that really the path you want to take?" Eve asked, "A woman you sold drugs to turns up dead in the pool – the very place where you regularly sold her the drugs, no less – and your strategy is to clam up. It doesn't make you look innocent, Floyd."

  The man’s conventionally handsome face was cast in a melancholically contemplative expression as he gazed at the chains on his wrist.

  "I heard she was dead," the man said with an almost wistful note in his voice. He sounded weak and exhausted as if his recovery and the bleak hospital room were wearing him down. He stared at the chains on his wrists with fatalistic ennui. "I knew it meant trouble, so I came around to clear out my stash and books. When I found you already there, I lost my head." He turned his face further away, "When I realized you'd already breached the shed, I figured all was lost. I was going to make a run for it after I shot you both, head for the Canadian border. I knew that woman's death was going to be trouble for me, but I didn't do it. I didn't kill her." He turned, looking at least into Eve's face with an anguished expression, "I swear to you, Agent Hope, I didn't kill that woman. I sold her drugs, yes. I sell prescription pills to roughly a third of the Lion's Hill members. But I ran a clean business – no hassle, no dirty-cut drugs, and no rough stuff. Every one of my clients was happy to keep it quiet. I had a smooth operation. I even kept a record of my customers with legitimate prescriptions so that I wouldn’t give anybody a heart attack.”

  “That’s a smooth line, Floyd,” Eve said, eyeing the man suspiciously, “But I’m afraid I need a little more proof than that. Can you verify your whereabouts last night between ten p.m. and two a.m.?”

  “As a matter of fact, I can," the imprisoned Cartwright admitted, "Although my alibi isn't going to be eager to admit it."

  “Why’s that?” Eve prompted.

  “Because," said Cartwright, heaving a sigh and shutting his eyes, "last night I had a midnight appointment to pick up a shipment of prescriptions from Doctor Sydney Duquesne."

  “Dr. Duquesne?” Eve repeated the name to ensure she’d heard correctly.

  "That's right, although around here, she's got another name."

  “Oh?” Eve raised her eyebrow, “What’s that?”

  “Ask for Doctor Absolem,” the man said cryptically, “and she’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

  “Dr. Absolem?” Eve was confused, “I thought you said her name was Duquesne.”

  “Dr. Duquesne will tell you I’m a liar,” said Cartwright in a sing-song kind of voice as if reciting a nursery rhyme, his eyes half shut, “But ask for Dr. Absolem, and you’ll see that I’m telling you the truth.”

  It must be the painkillers making him loopy, Eve thought, looking down in baffled frustration at her lugubrious suspect.

  “Dr. Absolem,” he repeated, laying back on the pillows as if a tremendous weight had been lifted from his shoulders, “Ask for…Doctor Absolem…”

  The man drifted off to sleep.

  Eve shook her head.

  It’s got to be the drugs. And yet…

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “I’m sorry.”

  The man’s words dripped with guttural misery in the total darkness of the house. He was still on the floor, sprawled supine at the wooden feet of his wife. He’d wept himself dry, smearing the sanded oak grain with his tears as he lamented before her.

  "I shouldn't have lost my temper like that," he said, lifting his face at last to look up at hers. She stared straight out into the darkness, her wooden-painted smile never wavering. The blade of the carving knife was still stuck in her frontal lobe.

  “I never should have threatened you,” the man said, “I shouldn’t have said those awful things to you. Oh, my darling Cindy! Can you ever forgive me?”

  Clutching first at the wooden back of the chair, then at her shoulders, the man clawed himself upright. When he was on his feet, he removed the knife from the wooden mannequin's skull. He cooed tenderly under his breath, addressing the slice in her head as gently as if it were a real flesh wound.

  “I’ll get you all fixed up, Cindy,” the man said, stroking the doll’s face with a compassionate hand. “The others don’t understand how lucky they are. They aren’t grateful for what they have. That’s why they have to learn. But you and me, Cindy, we get it. We understand that life isn’t fair, and it never will be. All we can do is be grateful and preserve the memory.”

  With a quiver of emotion in his voice, the man ran a gentle finger along the length of the knife gash in Cindy’s head.

  “Preserve the memory,” he repeated.

  Cindy was silent, smiling, preserving the memory.

  "Come on, darling," he said, "Why don't we watch a little television? I'll fix you up in the living room, and we can put all this unpleasantness behind us. How does that sound?"

  Cindy, of course, said nothing. The man did not seem deterred this time, however, as he worked his arms carefully under his wooden wife’s armpits and hoisted her up.

  Cindy disconnected just above the hips. From the bottom of her torso, she jutted a dowel peg about the circumference of a soup can. A matching hole was left behind in the cross-section of her lap.

  Grunting under the unwieldy burden of the solid wooden head and torso, the man struggled to carry his wife – her top half, at least – across the threshold from the kitchen into the living room. He propped her top half in the corner crook of the armed sofa and hurried back to the kitchen for her lower half, which was carved in a gracefully seated position. The folds of her skirt looked almost soft enough to be real.

  The man grunted as he hoisted her legs and waist from the kitchen chair. He got one arm under her wooden rump, the other under the crook of her knees. Touching Cindy’s salacious form still sent tingles of excitement all through his body, even though it had been years and years since the couple copulated.

  It isn’t fair, but so it goes.

  The thought was a familiar one to the man’s mind. He thought it so frequently, in fact, that it was no longer accompanied by any emotion at all. Much in life wasn’t fair, and yet it went on all the same. The tides of fate seemed to want not for fairness, nor for equality or balance, by the man’s estimations. All was madness. All was hopeless chaos. The most anyone could do was hold to their buoys of regularity and consistency to remember.

  Give up on fair. Fair is a ruse, a trap. The expectation of fairness only urges one to let down their guard, completely vulnerable to the whims of chaos. So it goes.

  That was the lesson that the world needed to learn. How much suffering could be avoided if people would only cease to expect fairness from chaos?

  With a huff of effort, the man set Cindy’s lower half down on the sofa and went about setting the peg of her torso down the waiting hole. Cindy slid back into being with elegance. Even as a wooden doll, the man thought, Cindy would always be a creature of grace, of beauty.

  “I’m sorry, okay?” the man muttered, adjusting her torso this way and that, fussing over her like a tentative husband over his sick wife. “I’m so sorry. Why don’t you just sit here and watch television while I go get the wood filler and sandpaper ready, alright? Here, I think I saw in the TV guide that there’s a new episode of your favorite soap opera airing tonight. I’ll get you fixed right up, and it’ll be like this whole thing never happened. What do you think of that, darling? Would that be alright?”

  Cindy stared blankly at the television in perfect silence, although the man hadn't switched it on yet. He looked at the long, thin scar his knife had left in the crown of her wooden head, and tears threatened to spill from his eyes once again.

  “Of course,” the man whispered, “You have every right to be mad at me. It’s my fault, after all. All of this is my fault. It’s not fair, but that doesn’t matter. None of this is fair.” He let out a shaky sigh and picked up the remote. He turned the television on and flicked through the channels until he found Cindy’s favorite soap opera.

  The bright lights and cheerful voices of the soap opera illuminated and filled the living room, but the man didn't feel any better. He only got a clearer view of the damage he'd inflicted on his wooden wife. He shuddered and looked away, despising himself, and he slunk out of the room and down the hallway toward the garage.

  “You stupid man,” he chastised himself as he opened the door to the garage and groped around in the darkness for the light switch, “You know, you graduated top of your class from Branting University. You were the president of your fraternity. You picked the right girl and made an honest woman of her. And you’re still the stupidest man I know. It’s not fair. Nothing’s fair. So it goes.”

  The light in the garage flickered on. The man stepped out onto the cool concrete floor in his socks and walked around the hood of his black BMW sedan to his workbench.

  The man sorted through the various tools and materials scattered across the workbench, tossing aside towel refuse and empty jugs of Shock-Bright as he searched for the wood filler. He found the substance a moment later, along with a few sheets of fine-grade sandpaper.

  Tucking these under his arm, the man paused in front of the large, mostly uncarved block that sat in the middle of the workbench. He reached out a hand to stroke the wood lovingly.

  “Soon,” he said, speaking in a tender voice to the block of wood, which was roughly the height and width of a healthy infant, “When my stupid temper allows me time.”

  With a forlorn sigh, the man returned through the garage door. He cast one last long look back at the uncarved block.

  "You will be a son," the man said, mostly to himself, with a smile that he felt deep in the cockles of his bones. "I can just tell. You will be a strong, healthy baby boy. Goodnight, son. Daddy loves you."

  The man shut off the light, chuckling to himself as he shut the garage door. The smile faded from his lips, however, as he heard the soap opera from down the hall and remembered the apologetic task ahead of him. His shoulders slumped. All he wanted was a little peace and quiet, a little time to work on a task that really should have been Cindy's, to begin with – the creation of their child.

  But of course, he'd lost his temper, so now it was his duty to patch things up. Cindy would be quiet and detached, and he wouldn't get so much as a flicker of thanks or love from her. He returned to the living room and sat down next to his wife.

  “Alright, darling, face me,” the man gently instructed, setting down the wood filler, putty knife, and sandpaper on the sofa cushion between them.

  Cindy, of course, did not move.

  The man reached out and took his wife delicately yet firmly by the waist, rotating her torso so that her gauged forehead was facing him and the light.

  “Alright, beautiful, hold still,” the man said without a trace of irony or humor in his voice, “This won’t hurt a bit.”

  Working carefully, the man spread the filler across the wound, filling and covering the scar with a smooth layer of wood glue. He scraped the putty knife carefully across his work, picking up any excess filler, then sat back to wait with a patient, hopeful expression on his face.

  “There, now,” he said, his tone reflecting that he was pleased with his work, “You’ll be all sealed up in about fifteen minutes. Just in time for the end of your show. Then maybe we’ll watch the news while I sand you down and give you a fresh coat of paint. We’ll kiss and make up when you’re dry, and then we can go to bed at peace with each other. How does that sound?”

  Cindy, of course, said nothing.

  The man wilted.

  Just once, he longed for her to reply. He yearned to hear her voice, if only one more time, telling him that she loved him. He wanted to hear that she appreciated all the effort.

  He wanted to know that she hadn’t forgotten him either.

  The soap opera ended earlier than the man expected. The wood filler was still drying. The man cleared his throat, looking nervously at Cindy.

  “Do you mind if I put on the news before I start sanding you down? You don’t mind, do you?”

  Cindy said nothing.

  The man reached for the remote and changed the channel to the local news station.

  “…local authorities still have offered no comment on the status of the cases, although our sources inform us that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has taken over jurisdiction of both murder investigations,” a stern-faced news anchor was saying. The man grinned in spite of himself.

  “And they’re going to keep looking a long time, too,” the man said, smiling at his wife. “Those fools are running around in circles, which is what they do best. It’s good for a laugh, really. Not much else.”

  Cindy didn’t laugh. She stared at the TV, unblinking. The man sighed.

  “Of course, you’ll never tell me what you think of what I’ve been doing,” the man said, “Whether it's right or wrong, wicked or just. You’ll just stare straight ahead, no matter what I do. If I’m good to you and evil to them or evil to you and good to them, it doesn’t matter. You just stare on ahead, never moving, never speaking.”

 

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