the line. Finally Larry swore under his breath.
"Where's a pen?" he asked somebody. Then to me: "Let me have your number, Tres."
I gave it to him.
"Okay," he said. "Give me a couple of days."
"Thanks, Larry."
"And, Tres - this is a personal favor. Let's just keep it personal."
"You got it."
He cleared his throat. "Yeah, well, I owed your dad a lot. It's just that the Sheriff is sensitive to taxpayer dollars being used on, let's say, nonessential work. It also doesn't help if it's about one of his predecessors who beat him in three straight elections, you know what I mean?"
I checked with SAPD next. After a few minutes of being transferred from line to line, I finally got Detective Schaeffer, who sounded like he'd just woken up from a nap. He told me Ian Kingston, formerly with Criminal Investigations, had moved to Seattle two years ago and was presently overseeing a large private security firm. Kingston's ex-partner, David Epcar, was presently overseeing a small burial plot in the Sunset Cemetery.
"Wonderful," I said.
Schaeffer yawned so loud it sounded like somebody was vacuuming his mouth.
"What was your name again?" he asked.
I told him.
"Like in Jackson Navarre, the county sheriff that got killed?"
"Yeah."
He grunted, evidently sitting up in his chair.
"That was the biggest pain in the ass we've had since Judge Woods took a hit," he said. "Fucking circus."
It wasn't exactly a show of sympathetic interest.
Seeing as I was out of other options, however, and had to say something before the detective fell back asleep, I decided to give Schaeffer my best song and dance.
Much to my surprise, he didn't hang up on me.
"Huh. Call me back in a week or so, Navarre. If I get a chance to look at the files, maybe you can ask me some questions."
"That's mighty white of you, Detective."
I think he was snoring before his receiver hit the cradle.
By sunset it still wasn't cool enough to run without getting heat stroke. I settled for fifty push - ups and stomach crunches in the living room, then held horse stance and bow stance for ten minutes each. Robert Johnson lounged across the cool Linoleum in the kitchen and watched. Afterward I lay flat on my back with my muscles burning, letting the air conditioner dry the sweat off my body and listening to the dying hum of the cicadas outside. Robert Johnson crawled onto my chest and sat there looking down at me, his eyes half-closed.
"Good workout?" I asked.
He yawned.
I unpacked a few boxes, drank a few beers, watched the fireflies floating around in Gary Hales's backyard at dusk. I tried to convince myself I wasn't fighting any kind of compulsion to call Lillian. Give her some time.
No problem. It was just a coincidence that I kept staring at the phone.
I started digging through my box of books until I found Lillian's letters wedged in between the Snopes family and the rest of Yoknapatawpha County. I read them all, from her first in May to the one that had arrived last Thursday, just as I was packing. Reading them made me feel much worse.
Irritated, I dug around in the box some more, looking for some lighter reading material - Kafka maybe, or an account of the Black Plague. What I found instead was my father's scrapbook.
It was a huge canvas - covered three-ring binder stuffed with just about every insignificant piece of writing he'd ever scribbled but was too lazy to throw away. There were yellowed drawings he'd done for me when I was live or six-stick figures of armies and airplanes that he'd used to illustrate his drunken Korean bedtime stories to me. There were letters that had never been mailed to friends who had long since died. There were pages of notes on old cases he'd been pursuing that meant nothing to me. There were grocery lists.
I still have no idea why I'd taken the scrapbook from his desk after the funeral, or why I'd kept it, or why I decided to look at it again now, but I sat down on the futon with it now and started flipping through. In several places I'd dog-eared interesting pages, most of which I'd forgotten about. One of them caught my
attention.
A yellowed piece of spiral paper, the kind of scrap my dad was always leaving around the house, filled with rambling reminders to himself. It appeared to be a list of notes for a trial testimony he was making against Guy White, a suspected local drug trafficker. Then