As he reentered sleep he laughed remembering when their little group of outcasts including two local mixed- bloods had fired some stolen bottle rockets at the Mouton brothers’ fake cowboy camp in a woodlot up the steep hill behind town. The attack came at dawn while the Moutons were asleep. When the rockets hit Sunderson and his group jumped up screaming and charged up the hill. Sunderson’s terrier-Lab mix upended the biggest brother by ripping at a pant leg. Sunderson’s gang got the shit beat out of them but it was worth it. Unfortunately the rocket had started a fire in the woods that spread to a few acres and his dad had to accompany him to the police station where he was threatened with reform school way down in Lansing. His laughter dampened when he recalled Diane’s first visit north when they were seniors at Michigan State. He had seen her glance at the raw board floors of the dining room and the oval braided rug his mother had made. The whole family had immediately loved Diane and were quick to tell Sunderson he wasn’t good enough for her. His dad had taken him aside and told him that Diane had too much “class” and was sure to ditch him.
The last bit of laughter came at dawn when Sunderson dreamed the smell of fire and he remembered a remote cabin that served as a meth lab over near Crystal Falls that had burned one April. There had been a late snow and he rode in with a new local deputy on a snowmobile. The fire was still smoldering and right away Sunderson smelled burned flesh but didn’t mention it to the deputy, waiting for him to make his own discovery. It was a bright blue day and Sunderson enjoyed the growing warmth that meant it was over freezing temperature. He watched the deputy poking in the ruins until he heard him yell, “Jesus Christ, a fucking burned-up body!” The deputy puked then fainted. Sunderson rubbed snow on his face and the deputy looked up and said, “It’s my wife’s birthday. I was going to grill steaks and now I’m not.”
Mona called just as Sunderson was leaving the room short of 7:00 a.m. “I missed your peeking. It was like a vacuum.”
“Never mind. What’s up?”
“I found out Dwight’s origins. His mom was in the Peace Corps in Uganda. She got knocked up by a French civil engineer working on a dam project. She died from various tropical diseases when Dwight was a year old. He was raised by his grandparents. They died then it was foster parents.”
“I’m running late. Fax it along. Also go in my study and check page 300 of Judy Crichton’s America 1900. Something about the Middle Ages from the New York Times. I forgot a quote I used to know by heart.” It must be age he thought.
“Okay, right away. Darling, I miss your old eyes burning a hole in my butt from your peek hole.”
Sunderson said thank you and rushed out.
His mind flip-flopped seeing Lucy with her father. She acted like a ditzy teenager. It wasn’t a chink in her armor but a whole gully. His name was Bushrod, a name Sunderson had only encountered in certain New England historical texts. He was Scots-English, a bantam sun-wizened bully with tiny tufts of gray hair coming out of his ears and eyebrows that needed a haircut.
“Ten minutes late Mister Crime Buster. I can’t eat breakfast in public at this place. All those desperate old widows trying to replace the husbands they killed. I can’t say I’ve shaken hands with a detective. You ought to look into Lucy’s swindler husband,” Bushrod said, offering his hand without getting up from the breakfast table in Lucy’s room. The Wall Street Journal and New York Times were folded beside his plate of scrambled eggs and link sausage, which he had covered with Tabasco, also a habit of Sunderson’s.
Lucy fluttered around, her face pink from embarrassment, stowing water and box lunches into a pretty canvas satchel. “Daddy, please.” She glanced furtively at Sunderson who ate hastily because Bushrod was now up and pacing near the door, muttering at the front page of the Journal.
“They ought to guillotine fifty thousand brokers in Battery Park. Can’t you law people arrange it?”
“This is the first workday of my retirement,” Sunderson said, amused at this antique nutcase, obviously the source of Lucy’s lifestyle. Lucy had called him a “desert rat,” someone who found the deserts of the Southwest obsessively interesting.
“Find something to do full time or you’ll die on the vine,” Bushrod pronounced as if he were Moses.
“I’m investigating the evil connection between religion, money, and sex,” Sunderson joked, relieved that his own father had been a mild, kind man.
“Excellent. Send me the results.”
