Free Antler Dust (The Allison Coil Mystery Series Book 1) by Mark Stevens Page B

covered the greenhouse and kitchen in plants, her mute pals. The collection now expanded to the living room and hung from the ceiling. It took up every corner of unused space.
    It was an easy life that had put roundness, a layer of padding and real hips onto her bony build. Her frame, gaunt in high school, was now more recognizably that of a woman. The humidity from the plants, especially in the greenhouse, kept her skin soft. Her hair hung down to the middle of her back. Her face was long, with clear brown eyes and it looked okay, nothing spectacular, with straight teeth and a smallish nose.
    The problem, of course, was mobility. Seven years now of seizures. She had simply come to accept the house as a comfortable, familiar cell. She could drive, but it was risky. The doctors had trained her to watch and sense the faint aura in her vision, like a smear of Vaseline, as a warning sign. She could stop the car and wait for the seizure to pass. The doctors had said her spells didn’t seem to be violent, but that might not always be the case. They only wanted her to drive on the back roads where she could go slowly. But the only way to Glenwood Springs and Eagle, the two closest towns, meant fourteen miles of interstate in one direction, twenty-two in the other. Take your pick. She didn’t want to be going sixty-five and watching for auras. Nor did she want to be picking her way around the winding roads that hugged the banks of the Colorado River and worrying about where she would pull over to let the episode run its course. She didn’t want strangers tending to her or calling ambulances.
    And when they did start, there went the sales clerk job at the clothing store in Glenwood Springs and gradually her sense of independence. When George was gone for one of his long stretches, either on a hunt or flying his plane up to a remote neck of the woods, a member of his crew was given the task of visiting once in the morning and once in the afternoon to check on her, to make sure she hadn’t keeled over in a fit and to do any odd chores she wanted done. They called it “Trudy Duty.” It hadn’t taken her long to get over the strange feeling of having what amounted to a personal valet. Few of them refused a warm plate of her best food—Chinese chicken, Thai beef salad, or pork chops in apricot-ginger marinade. It was one way of saying thanks to those who helped her out. She could get chauffeured into town when she wanted to go to the bookstore or eat lunch. Groceries were delivered once a week. She had a satellite dish for entertainment. Trudy was made to feel her illness was being compensated for and accommodated. But it was not treated.
    George had stalled when it came to her desire to travel to Denver where specialists were perfecting fixes for her type of seizures. They could peel off a chunk of your skull, attach a bunch of probes, reattach the skull, wait for the next seizure, determine precisely which part of the brain was going haywire when the seizure took place and then, if the part of the brain involved didn’t seem crucial to memory or speech or motor control, snip it out.
    “Wait until they perfect the procedure,” George had said. “We don’t have insurance or the thirty thousand dollars to put up front. And what’s wrong with the way things are?”
    That’s where Rocky Carnivitas had offered a refreshingly different point of view. There was a sweet and amiable side to Rocky, despite a slightly tousled and unschooled manner. He had drawn “Trudy Duty” three days in a row earlier in the summer and had held her and comforted her through a fierce seizure that came on while they sat in the car in the dirt parking lot after the annual rodeo in Eagle. The rest of the night Rocky had stayed close, like a first-time dad. Rocky was the only one of the hands who had shown any interest in her situation. The others all wanted to know as little as possible.
    “If George doesn’t say it, he manages to imply that he