Free Cypress Grove by James Sallis Page B

punctuate or parse as he would. Eventually I left Randy at the kitchen table and went out to the phone in the hall. He was still in there talking to me.
    I didn’t bother calling Sally Gene at home, but after a number of tries tagged her at the Baptist psych unit. When a nurse handed the phone over, Sally Gene took it and said, “I’m busy.”
    “You always are. I’m looking for my favorite social worker.”
    “Turner?”
    “Your favorite driver. But this time, I’m the one who needs a ride-along.”
    I told her about Randy.
    “Is he oriented?” Sally Gene asked.
    “Comes and goes. Rest of the time, it’s hard to tell.”
    “He knows you?”
    “Yes.”
    “And once you started talking to him, he was able to lay out a sequence of events?”
    “More or less.”
    “Has he been eating?”
    Yes again. I’d looked in the refrigerator and found stacks of TV dinners.
    “Alcohol?”
    “Not that I know. I’d be surprised. Never much of a drinker, two or three beers’d be his limit. And I think he only did that to fit in.”
    “So what are we looking for here?”
    “I don’t know. We’re on your ship, with this. You’re the skipper.”
    “Little outside what I’m used to, what I do day to day. And it’s been a while since I trained. We want to get him some help, obviously. Observation, at the very least. . . . Any sign he’s a danger to himself?”
    “Not that I can see.”
    “We don’t want to jam him up on the job, so we’ll be wanting to keep it off the public record.”
    “If that’s possible, great. But the most important thing’s to help him dig out of this, whatever it takes.”
    “Okay, listen. Let me make a few calls. I’ll get back to you. What’s the number there?”
    I gave it to her and went out to the kitchen, where Randy, quiet at last, had fallen asleep with his head on the table. On the refrigerator, magnets shaped and painted as miniature vegetables held up sheaves of coupons and grocery receipts. A drawing his daughter Betty had done years ago hung under another magnet that first looked to be an angel or cherub but on closer inspection turned out to be a pig with wings.
    “Hey, you’re here!” Randy said.
    Within the hour, we were checking him in at Southside Clinic. Set up to care for the indigent, Sally Gene told me when she called back, by a young doctor from up east, an idealistic sort, but damned good from all she heard. She’d made inquiries of colleagues, pretending she needed the information for one of her clients. Southside was expecting us. She’d meet us there.

Chapter Fifteen
    “THE THING WE CAN’T understand is who could possibly want to kill Carl. He was harmless, sweet. It would be like crushing a kitten. Nor do we have any idea what he was doing here, or how he got here in the first place, or why.”
    Sarah Hazelwood and I were sitting on the bench outside Manny’s Dollar $tore. Adrienne and Mr. Hazelwood had driven off to find rooms. I’d directed them to Ko-Z Kabins out by the highway. A longish drive, and the sort of place you apologize ahead of time for recommending, but what else was there.
    “I take it you’re all a family.”
    “Just like choosing where to be from, Mr. Turner. Families can be chosen too.” She smiled. “I don’t mean to be confrontational.”
    “I understand.”
    “Dad’s not Adrienne’s father, but she never treats him as if he’s anything else. In some ways, she’s closer to him than I am.”
    “You and Adrienne—”
    “Half sisters. Mother had her before she married Dad, when she wasn’t much more than a girl herself. Adrienne was raised by grandparents. Then, not long after Mother died, Adrienne came looking for her. This wasn’t supposed to be possible, with all kinds of blinds set up, but Hazelwoods are a resourceful lot. Adrienne and Dad got along famously from the first. She stayed with us for a few days, days became a week, eventually we all understood she wasn’t going to leave. The rest developed