One Lane Bridge: A Novel (9 page)
Read One Lane Bridge: A Novel Online
Authors: Don Reid
The house was quiet and dark except for a light in Angela’s room and one in his and Karlie’s room. It was after ten. He knew neither of them was asleep, but he came in quietly and took his cell phone off and plugged it into the charger on the kitchen counter. He got a Diet Coke from the refrigerator and walked upstairs. He found Karlie on the bed leafing through a
People
magazine from back to front, the way she always read it.
“How was everything at the restaurants?”
“Okay. A little strained, but okay.”
“Have you been there all this time?”
He could lie to her and say yes or tell her the truth and say no and open up the whole subject all over again. For all he knew, she had talked to someone at both restaurants earlier in the evening and already knew he wasn’t there the entire time. He had gone back to each after he dropped Jack at his house to lock up, but there certainly was a window from about six forty-five to eight fifteen he couldn’t account for unless he told her the truth. And frankly, whether she
had
called the restaurants and checked on him didn’t really matter at the moment. He simply needed her right now—her support, her understanding, and her help.
“I’ll talk about that in a minute. How’s Angela?”
“She’s Angela. She’ll be fine.” Karlie smiled, still looking at her
People.
“I called her this evening. Did she tell you?”
“Oh, yeah. She and your mother are worried there’s something wrong with you.” Now she looked up from her magazine. “Is there?”
“Nothing more than usual.”
“You’ve been back out to that bridge, haven’t you?”
“And I took Jack with me.”
“So, what did he think?”
“The same thing you do. He thinks I’m loony and in need of a shrink. A ‘psychological lapse,’ I think he called it.”
J. D. sat on the bed as if he were about to take his shoes off but didn’t. Karlie reached over and rubbed the back of his neck.
“I know how you feel about all this,” he said, “but I need a sounding board. I need to say out loud some of what’s on my mind.”
He turned and looked at her for a response, but all he saw was a concerned smile. Then finally she said, “Try me.”
“Okay. I go for a ride in the country, and I come upon this family. I won’t go into the details again because I know they upset you. But I run into this family, and then I come home and tell you about it. At your suggestion, we go back out there the next morning, and they and the bridge are gone. I’ve been thinking, ‘What changed?’ The first thing that hit me was the time of day. The first time was about seven twenty in the evening, and they were there. The next time was around eleven, eleven thirty the next morning. I even thought it might be the car. I was in the TR the first time, and we were in the van the next. So I thought the key had to be the time of day or the car. So I went back that same night, Tuesday night, at seven twenty in the van and I was able to cross over. So that told me it was the time of day and not the car. Do you follow me?”
“Don’t ask me to agree with you or even understand. I’m your sounding board. Just talk.”
“Okay. So now that I think I’ve figured out the key, Jack and I went back out tonight at exactly seven twenty and zip, nothing. So it’s not the car
or
the time of day. And, honey, it’s the time that has me concerned. One day passed on this side while two years passed on that side, and by the time I figure out how to cross over again, she may be dead.”
“Who may be dead?”
“The girl. Haven’t I told you about the nail in her foot and the blood poisoning?”
There was a long, chilling pause.
“J. D., you’re scaring me all over again. What are you talking about?”
J. D. jumped up, as irritated at his wife’s reluctance to understand as she was at his insistence to make her understand. She was crying and rolling her magazine into a tight tube that spoke volumes about what was going on inside her.
“I’m going downstairs. You go to bed, and we’ll talk some other time.”
“J. D., please. Please see someone about all this. Do it for Angela.”
But he was gone down the steps and out the sliding-glass doors to the back patio. He sat in one of the lounge chairs and looked up at the stars. He had to make sense of all of this by himself because no one else was going to understand.
Lying there, staring at the stars with his mind racing, reminded him of countless summer nights he had spent in his backyard as a kid. He would sprawl in the grass on his back with his dog, King, on one side of him and Jack on the other, talking about the world and the future. A couple of ten-year-olds trying to understand the universe and all it held.
“Wouldn’t you like to be able to fly?” J. D. once asked innocently.
“Not me. My daddy says if God meant for man to fly, everybody would be born without luggage.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I don’t know, but he always says it, and everybody laughs real big.”
“I wouldn’t want to be an astronaut. That’d be too scary. Maybe a jet pilot.”
“Do astronauts have stewardresses?”
“You mean stewardesses.”
“Whatever.”
“Naw. But jet pilots do.” And they both laughed loudly and heartily enough to make King bark one sharp yip as his contribution.
“Do you think if you got on a spaceship you could fly into the future?” Jack asked with all the sincerity of his age.
“Maybe. Or maybe back into the past.”
“Boy, that would be cool! Where would you want to go?”
“You first,” J. D. countered. “Where would you want to go?”
Jack thought on it a minute and then said slowly, as if choosing words that were going into some sort of proclamation, “I’d like to go back to the Old West. To an old western town like on
Gunsmoke.
Meet Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok and Matt Dillon.”
“Matt Dillon ain’t real.”
“Yes, he is.”
“No, he ain’t. Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok are real, but Matt Dillon is made up.”
“Well, I’d still like to meet him.” Jack held his ground. “What about you? Where would you like to go? Or do you want King to go next?”
They both laughed really big at this joke too, and Jack reached across J. D. and rubbed the old dog’s head when he barked again at the sound of his name. All three settled down, and after a minute of real contemplation, J. D. said, “I’d like to go back and meet my grandfather. He was a preacher, and everybody tells all kinds of neat stories about him. He died before I was born. He died in the war. World War II. So I’d like to go back sometime before he died just to see what he was really like.”
“Was he real religious?”
“I said he was a preacher. Of course he was religious.”
“But I mean did he pray all the time and stuff?”
“Yeah, I reckon. Not all the time maybe. Some of the time he was shootin’ people in the war. And then he got shot.”
“Speakin’ of shootin’ people, have you ever noticed in
Gunsmoke
how at the start of every show Matt Dillon is out in the street, and he and the bad guy draw and shoot and the bad guy beats him to the draw and shoots first, but then Matt Dillon shoots him? I think it’s weird how the bad guy actually outdraws him.”
“You’re just eat up with Matt Dillon.”
“You like him too.”
“Yeah, but not like you do.”
And then the conversations would go on and on, and the nights would weave into late summer, and the talks in the grass evolved to talks in their cars as they circled the town square as teenagers. And then to the all-night coffee shops during college. They never tired of trying to decipher the mysteries of the universe and the wonders of the world around them. And they always did it together. Just as they were trying to do now in finding the secret to the latest enigma in their lives. But this one wasn’t really theirs. It was all J. D.’s, and he was becoming more and more aware of that fact with each passing hour. He couldn’t share it with Jack or with Karlie. They hadn’t experienced it. They couldn’t know what it meant to him, what he was feeling. Not like the many things they had shared together. And with these thoughts running wildly through his head, he almost fell asleep until something from deep inside jarred him unmercifully awake.
He had it! He knew the code! He locked the glass doors and ran for the car.
Midnight on a country road is dark. No street lights. No passing headlights. No neon signs. Just a heavenly quiet with shadows from the atmosphere of God’s perfect nature. J. D. sat on the hood of his little green Triumph, basking in the serenity of it all. The moon and the stars reflected off the silvery steel of the one lane bridge. In the distance he could see just the outline of two chimneys from the old farmhouse behind the rising hill. It was too late to pay a visit, but that didn’t bother him now because he knew he could come back.
He wasn’t aware how long he had been sitting there; he only realized that he was smiling from somewhere down in his soul. This was
his
. All his, and no one else could help him. The only way for him to cross over was to be alone. Not with Karlie or Jack or a doctor or anyone else. Alone was how he had to handle this, and he was up to the task of doing whatever it was he was supposed to do. He now knew the “what” and the “how.” Maybe later, God willing, he’d learn the “why.”
The phone rang at 6:30 a.m. J. D. usually got it before the second ring, but this morning it sounded so very far away. He couldn’t figure out where the noise was coming from, and he heard it blast at least three times before someone finally silenced it. That someone was Karlie, reaching over him from her side of the bed and picking up the receiver from the nightstand.
“Hello. Yes. All right. All right. All right. That’ll be fine. Thank you. Good-bye.”
J. D. lay with his eyes shut, waiting for her to put the phone back on the table, but she never did. She had apparently just hit the off button and was sitting against the headboard with it still in her hand.
Putting his arm wearily across his eyes to block out any semblance of daylight that might be leaking through the blinded windows, he said, “One of the restaurants?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t tell me. Lottie didn’t come in.”
“No. Lottie is in. That was her on the phone. And Crystal is there. Katherine didn’t come in.”
Now he allowed himself a peek from the corner of his eye and saw the strange and puzzled look on his wife’s wide-awake face.
“What’s that say to you?” he asked.
“Could mean anything. Could go either way.”
J. D. stared across the room at the blank TV screen at the foot of their bed and then rubbed his eyes with both hands. “Don’t forget what the Godfather told Michael.”
“I beg your pardon?” Karlie said with more than a hint of concern.
“The Godfather told Michael that the guilty one would be the one who made contact with him. He said, ‘Whoever approaches you, whoever gets in touch with you, that’s your guilty man.’ And it was Fish.”
“Abe Vigoda,” she corrected.
“Yeah,” J. D. continued, “Fish was the one who came to him after the funeral and suggested they have a meeting, and he was the guilty one.”
“And what does all this have to do with our situation?”
“I’m not sure, but it’s good to see you smile at me again.”
Karlie threw the covers back and got out of bed, saying, “Well, if I was smiling, I apologize. And what are you so chipper about this morning anyway? You didn’t come to bed till two o’clock.”
“I found some peace in all this, Karlie. Let’s not talk about it right now because it always goes off in the wrong direction and we wind up on opposite ends, and I just don’t want to be on the outs with you right now. I need things to be right, so let’s just agree not to talk about it. I think I’ll be able to explain it soon.”
Karlie asked, “Are you going in early this morning, or do you want me to?”
“I’ll handle both places. You call Katherine and see what’s eating her. She always liked you better than she did me anyway.”
As J. D. showered and shaved, his mind raced with all he had to do. First up was the meeting with Lavern Justice at ten o’clock. He wasn’t sure why he was so nervous about that, but there was something about the woman that set him on edge. She was friendly enough but spoke with an air of authority and superiority that made him uneasy. But she had called
him,
so why should he even worry about her? And anyway, that wasn’t what was foremost in his mind. The most urgent thing this morning was to find a way to get a bottle of penicillin to the Clem house. He could beg Jack one more time, but in his heart he knew that was useless. He could go to his family doctor and fake some kind of illness, but last night he had exhausted every possible scenario he could think of and hadn’t come up with the right sort of deceitful story that would bag him the goods he needed. His best chance was his dentist. He could fake a toothache and hope for the best. The hardest thing would be getting an appointment. He would have to make it sound like a real emergency.
J. D. was at the downtown restaurant by seven thirty to help Lottie and Crystal at the tables and do a few things in the kitchen that Katherine ordinarily would have done. He asked them what they knew about Katherine’s failure to show up, and they both insisted they had not talked to her since she left the building yesterday afternoon. Lottie said this was not unusual as they didn’t normally socialize outside of work, and Crystal just shrugged her shoulders. This concluded the extent of their conversation for the hour and a half he was there.
Just before leaving, he went in the little office and closed the door. He looked up the number for Dr. Howard Carnham and dialed.
“Hello, Dr. Carnham, DDS.”
“Hello. Who is this please?”
“This is Cheryl.”
“Cheryl, this is J. D. Wickman. I’m a patient of Dr. Carnham’s.”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Wickman. How are you this morning?”
“Well, that’s why I’m calling. I’ve got a little problem, and I was wondering if you could work me in sometime this morning.”
“And what exactly is the problem?”
“I’m not real sure. It’s a terrible toothache. It’s really not swollen all that badly, but it’s real sore to the touch, and I’m afraid to let it go any longer.”
“How long has it been bothering you, Mr. Wickman, and what tooth is it?”
“It’s been going on for a couple of days now, and it’s in the back on the upper right hand side.”
“Dr. Carnham could see you at four fifteen this afternoon.”
“Nothing sooner?”
“I’m afraid not. He’s not in today until after lunch, and then he has three extractions. Four fifteen is the earliest he could possibly see you.”
“Okay then. Four fifteen it is, and thank you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Wickman, and have a nice day.”
Shortly after nine he arrived at the west-end restaurant, and after forty-five minutes at his desk he looked at his watch and realized Lavern Justice would be there soon. He fixed a decanter of coffee and set two cups in the back booth against the wall, the one farthest from the front door. It was the most private table on the floor, and he had a feeling privacy was going to be of the utmost importance.
At precisely ten o’clock she walked in the door and straight toward him. She looked smaller than she had in her living room. She was dressed in tan slacks and a leather jacket that looked too heavy for the season. She smiled as he rose; she shook his hand with a firm confidence and sat down with no further invitation.
“I see you have coffee ready and waiting. You read my mind.”
“I thought you looked like a coffee drinker. It’s a little game I play with myself. I can tell when a customer walks in the door if they’re a coffee drinker or a Coke or iced-tea drinker. And more and more, just plain water drinkers. Used to be, people were ashamed to ask for just water. Afraid they’d appear cheap. Now they do it with pride to show how health conscious they are.”
Lavern laughed and agreed and made some comment about how times have changed, then let the conversation crawl to a standstill and just stared across the table at her young host.
“We have a lot to talk about, J. D. Wickman.”
“Do we?” he asked with equal amounts flippancy and sincerity. “You’re the one who called me, so I figured you had something to tell.”
“Two days ago when you came to see me, I felt there were unresolved issues when you left. That maybe you had more you wanted to say.”
“Not really.” J. D. didn’t lie. There was more to say, but he wasn’t sure he had wanted to say it. But this woman was not about to let a thread hang without tugging at it.
“You’re not doing family tree research, J. D. And I doubt if your grandmother ever lived in the state, much less the county. So what’s it all about, and why do I find you so interesting?”
“I’m not sure I can answer that one for you. But while we’re asking questions, why are you so dead sure I’m lying to you? I only came by your house because a girl at the courthouse said you might have some background.”
“That’s part of it. You came by the house. It was urgent for you. You didn’t call or write or email. You came straight from the courthouse. It’s as if time was important. And time is not important to a family tree.”
“I think you’re seeing more in this than is there, Ms. Justice. Maybe you just don’t like me—I rub you wrong—and you’re trying to pick me apart.”
“On the contrary. I like you very much, J. D. That’s why I called you yesterday. I think I can help you.”
“Wonderful!”
Lavern Justice squinted across the table at him and said in her lowest and severest tone yet, “You be honest with me, and I’ll be honest with you.”
J. D. said nothing. He just studied her countenance. She was a serious and deeply concerned woman. She had something to say, and he felt his silence would best draw her out. Sparring with her would only prolong the inevitable. He smiled at her and gave her the floor.
“Have you ever heard of a Truth Light, Mr. Wickman?” she asked as he poured her a second cup of coffee.”
J. D. shook his head but said nothing.
“I’ve known a few people in my life who have what is called a Truth Light. It’s a light that shines in the corner of your eye. Very dim. Unobtrusive. But whenever someone lies to you, that light gets brighter and brighter. Sometimes it’s so bright it’s blinding. My dear old aunt Mandy in Ohio had the Light. And I’ve had a few friends in my lifetime who have had the same gift. It’s, let’s say, a lie barometer. It’s quite useful sometimes and quite annoying at other times.”
“And you have this light?”
“I do. And it’s very faint and weak today. But two days ago when you were in my den, it was like a sunrise after a week of rain. I could hardly hold my eye open.”
“Are you some sort of psychic, Ms. Justice?”
“Oh, no, nothing like that. It’s all spiritual. I’m very spiritual, as a matter of fact.”
She looked at J. D. a long time before speaking again. He wanted to say something but wasn’t sure how serious this conversation had gotten. But he was about to find out.
“Are you a man of faith, J. D.?”
“I go to the Presbyterian chu—”
“I didn’t ask you if you went to church, J. D.,” Lavern Justice interrupted. “I asked if you were a man of faith. Two entirely different questions.”
“Okay then. The answer is yes.”
“You have faith because you go to church?”
“No, I go to church because I have faith.”
“Good answer!” Lavern said as she threw her head back and roared out a laugh. But the laugh was gone as quickly as it came. She reached over and put her hand over his in a motherly fashion and said in a near whisper, “What’s going on, J. D.? You need someone you can trust, and I don’t know how to convince you of it, but I’m that someone. There’s nothing you can tell me I haven’t heard before. I’m not going to scoff at you or tell you you’re crazy. And if I can’t help you, I’ll tell you that, too. But right now I sense—I
know
—that you need someone.”
J. D. took time to absorb the words she had just spoken to him. He took so much time that he was suddenly aware that he wasn’t even uncomfortable keeping her waiting for an answer. And she wasn’t either. They both seemed to understand that these things took time, and there was comfort and understanding between them even in silence.
“Have you ever seen something that wasn’t there?” he asked as his opening feeler question.
“No. If you see it, it’s there. Think of it as dimensions. Not illusions.”
“I passed over a one lane bridge and was taken back in time. Back sixty-five years to that house your father owned. I met the family that lived there. One of them, a young girl, is sick, and she needs a medicine that wasn’t available at the time. And I’m the only one who can save her life.”
“Penicillin?”
“How’d you know that?”
“It isn’t hard to guess. Sixty-five years ago. It was quite a miracle drug when it came out. Still is, truth be known. But it was a big discovery about that time.”
“I need to go back out there, and I need to take her the medicine.”
“Do you need me to go with you?”
“I don’t think I can take you. I’m not really sure how this works … but … I think this is something only I can do. I suppose that makes me sound even crazier, but I don’t think I can cross over when someone else is with me. I know how that must sound.…”
“I understand. How can I help?”
“I need the drug.”
Lavern reached in her purse and pulled out a pencil and paper and began writing while J. D. continued talking.
“My wife and best friend think I’m crazy. They want me to see a doctor, and the only doctor I’m willing to see is one who can get me a bottle of penicillin.”
“Why do you think this will work? Is there infection?”
“Yeah. Nail through the foot.”
Lavern handed him the slip of paper. It had a name and address on it. The address was for a town twenty miles east, and the name was a Dr. Navin Annata. He read it and then asked, “Who is this?”
“He’s the man who can help you. Trust me.”
“Just what sort of doctor is he? And who … what are you?”
“J. D., you insult me. Call us spiritualists if you like. But know that we’re God-fearing and caring. We believe what you believe and maybe a little more. Let’s just say we’re willing to go the extra mile others often aren’t.”
“So when do I see this Dr. Annata?”
“As soon as you can get there.”
“Do I need an appointment?”
“As soon as you can get there,” she repeated as she rose to go.
“One more question, Ms. Justice. The light in your eye. What’s it look like right now?”
“As dim as a quarter moon on a cloudy night. Now hurry. You may not have much time.”