On Pins and Needles

“Mind if I sit down?” he asked, pointing with a nod of his head to the chair around the corner from her at the square oak table her father had made by hand.

“Suit yourself,” was Megan’s curt reply.

But for some reason, her response seemed to amuse him. He was fighting it, but a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth just the same.

“Are we getting defensive here?” he asked then.

“Since you seem to want to treat me like some kind of criminal, I guess we are, yes.”

He shot a glance at the wrist of the hand she was using to grasp her teacup and said, “I don’t see any hand cuffs and I haven’t hauled you into the station. How am I treating you like a criminal?”

“Your attitude.”

“My attitude. My attitude is that I’ve just found a body buried in your backyard and I have some questions about it. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.”

“I haven’t lived here since I was twelve years old. What do you expect me to know about it?”

“Twelve years old, huh? My brother Scott is thirty and he was in your class in elementary school. That’d mean you and your family moved away eighteen years ago, right?”

“Has the interrogation begun?”

That made him chuckle. Clearly at some point he’d begun to enjoy himself.

“I don’t think this could be considered an interrogation. But that is one of my questions, yeah.”

“Eighteen years ago—yes, that’s when my family left Elk Creek,” she supplied what was no secret. “What month?”

“June. Right after school let out for the summer.”

“What do you remember about that time?”

Megan rolled her eyes. “This is just silly.”

“Humor me,” he suggested, his tone cajoling now.

She took a deep breath and decided it wasn’t going to do anyone any good to go on being hostile. Besides, Josh Brimley was getting too much pleasure out of it and she didn’t want to contribute to that.

So, after a sigh, she said in a calmer tone, “What I remember about June, eighteen years ago, is that I didn’t want to leave. That my parents had turned an old school bus into a mobile home so we could live on the road going from one cause to another because they’d decided that being here was basically living with their heads in the sand and they couldn’t go on doing that when there were so many social and environmental in justices that needed to be ad dressed. They wanted to be active, not passive, and that meant not staying in Elk Creek.”

“How about the exact month you left? Do you remember anyone being around besides your mother and father?”

“My sister.”

“Anyone besides your mother, father and sister?” he amended.

“No.”

“Think about it.”

“I don’t have to think about it. I don’t remember anything except not wanting to go.”

Josh Brimley’s navy-blue eyes stayed on her, as if he knew better and would stay in a stare-down with her until she told him the truth. But that was the truth—she didn’t recall anything but being miserable at the thought of leaving her home to live in a bus and be taught by her mother rather than staying in one place and going to school like everyone else.

Maybe her continuing silence finally convinced Josh that she didn’t have any more to say on the matter because after a few moments he seemed to decide to make an attempt at sparking her memory rather than merely waiting her out.

“What about friends your parents might have had or maybe an uncle or a cousin? Do you remember anyone like that being around?”

“Neither of my parents have a brother and even if they did, both their families steer clear of them because they think my folks are lunatics. And as for friends, what I do remember was that there weren’t a lot of people around Elk Creek who my parents were close enough to to call friends. Their friends then and now are other people like them.”

“Okay, they didn’t have a lot of friends around town—that’s one thing more that you’ve remembered than you had a minute ago. Keep thinking about it. Did they maybe have a visit from a friend from some where else? Maybe who was here and then gone just before you left?”

“I don’t remember anyone. It was a long, long time ago. Do you remember who might have been around your house when you were twelve? Who your parents hung out with? Go ahead, June, eighteen years ago—tell me what you remember about it.”

Josh held up both hands, palms outward as if to ward off an attack. “Okay, point taken,” he conceded.

“Finally,” Megan said on another sigh.

“But I’m going to need to talk to your folks,” he said then.

“I know you’ll probably see this as my being uncooperative,” she prefaced. “But talking to my folks is easier said than done. They’re on board a ship off the coast of Peru trying to stop the dumping of waste solvents. It isn’t as if I can just pick up the phone and reach them.”

“How can they be contacted?”

“There’s a number I can call to have word sent out to the ship and then my parents will have to contact me when they can.”

“Then that’s what you’ll have to do.”

Just like that, Megan thought. He gave the order and she was supposed to follow it.

But she’d had a lifetime of role models who bucked authority at every turn and it wasn’t easy for her not to follow in those same shoes. Some thing about just the way he’d given the order made her feel contrary.

“I don’t see why I should have to bother them,” she said. “My parents didn’t have anything to do with whatever happened here any more than I did.”

“There’s someone buried in your backyard,” Josh said with forced patience, explaining the obvious and then adding to it. “And in the grave, along with the skeleton, is a news pa per dated June, eighteen years ago. That puts the time of death at the exact month, the exact year that your parents high tailed it out of town. Those are a whole lot of reasons why I need to talk to them.”

“They didn’t hightail it out of town. They left because of a strong social con science and a belief that they could make a difference in the world. Nowhere in that are they the kind of people who would bring harm to another human being, let alone bury them in their backyard and hightail it out of town.”

“Even good people can do bad things under certain conditions, Megan.”

She tried not to like the way her name sounded being said by that deep voice of his for the first time.

“My parents don’t do bad things under any conditions. They wouldn’t even hurt a fly. In fact, if one gets indoors, they chase it around until they can catch it in a cup and set it free outside. They’ve pro tested for the rights of people who are being abused or neglected or treated in any way unfairly. They’re against doing bad things.”

“I under stand that it’s impossible to believe the worst of your own family. But the fact is, someone was buried in your backyard at the same time your parents opted to take to the road. Now that may be circumstantial, it may be purely coincidental, but I’ll still need to talk to them about it.”

“Without condemning them with premature conclusions,” she said as if it were a condition she was applying.

“I’m not condemning anyone and I don’t have any premature conclusions. I’m just beginning at the be ginning.”