Cause of Death

18 One Year Later

I am standing behind the house, looking at the work shed that I have finally completed.

Tonight will be the christening, though in fact it’s really just an excuse for a barbecue. Ten or so folks will be here, among them cowgirl Brooke Hartford and her husband. She’s made two covered dishes, a category of cuisine in which she is undeniably as much of an expert as she is in the art of riding quarter horses and on the topic of the Reconstruction.

I return to the garage and my weekend cleaning routine.

The months have gone by quickly. I headed out of town during the breaks, spending time with Janet and her husband and their twin girls and several long weekends with Pax’s parents (long, in both senses of the word; still, family is family).

Between semesters I traveled to Bozeman, Montana, to conduct research for a book I’m planning on the missteps of westward expansion. Brooke wondered, “It is about the nineteenth century, Jon. Couldn’t you’ve found everything you wanted online? You really need to go in person?”

I replied, “Yes,” hitting both questions at once, bull’s-eye, like Annie Oakley was rumored to have done, splitting a bullet with the edge of an axe and striking two playing cards.

After an hour in the garage I’ve worked up quite the sweat; the detritus is losing the cleaning battle. I am filling bag upon bag with scraps of wood and broken tools, cans of dried paint, brushes not properly cleaned and therefore useless, mice-chewed wires, Spackle boxes gone to concrete. After the bags are filled and hauled outside I organize the shelves and, a task I’ve saved for dessert, pry dried grass out of the mower chute.

My eyes turn toward the door to a small storeroom against the back wall. I haven’t used it for years. I open the door, mindful of critters, of which there are none, and flip on the light.

I stop, frozen in place.

I’m looking at five framed prints of paintings, twenty-four by thirty inches. On the back are stickers: R. Johnson Framing and Art, Edwards Mills, MA. They are, as Rachel described, cheerful, city- and landscapes, all mass-produced reproductions by artists who are talented, if of uninspired vision. On a shelf are a dozen unframed prints, some rolled, some flat.

Rachel reported that Pax gave them to her clients. Yet, if these are the same ones, here they are, hidden and dust laden.

I heft the framed ones, take them inside the house and set the stack on the floor in the living room, the Eiffel Tower at Night in the front.

Hearing keys in the door, I turn.

Rachel Johnson is walking inside, toting a Whole Foods reusable bag. “Dropping off, then getting the kids at camp.”

She is wearing the black gypsy skirt and frilly blue blouse she changed into after our ten-mile mountain bike excursion this morning.

I rise and, kissing her, take the bag into the kitchen, saying, “Okay, have a mystery.”

“I’m intrigued.” She follows me into the living room.

“Look.”

Rachel gives a perplexed smile. “Patience’s prints.” She flips through the stack. “She didn’t give them away.”

“What do you think it’s all about?”

“No idea.” But then Rachel tilts her head, and her tangle of chestnut hair spills onto a shoulder. “When you came into the store last year? With the receipt for the job? Where was it?”

“The to-do stack. Bills.”

“It was on top?”

“That’s right.”

She eases onto the couch — the one on which we sometimes sit to watch TV, with her son and daughter, if the rating warrants. I am on the arm, looking at her thoughtful face.

Rachel takes my hand. “I’m thinking about what happened to her. Those terrible men, the ones in prison now.”

I nod.

She’s debating. “Well, we talked a lot, Patience and me, I was telling you. At the bakery, the gallery. Art some, food some, men a lot. She said such wonderful things about you. She said you were about as perfect a husband as can be.”

I inhale deeply and manage to hold it together.

“Well, what I’m thinking, she knows she’s doing something dangerous. And she comes in every week or so to get these crappy prints framed.” Her voice ends each sentence on a slightly higher pitch.

I suddenly get it. “So if something happened to her, we’d meet? You and me?”

Rachel gives one of her breezy laughs. “I said it was crazy.” She glances at her phone for the time. “Better go. The kids, Lord, I hope today wasn’t the bring-a-snake-home-to-mom project.”

I rise too and we embrace. The clasps of our arms are firm. So is the subsequent kiss.

After she’s gone I stand, hands on hips, and stare at the Eiffel Tower.

Thinking, of course, of her theory.

My wife setting me up from the grave?

And with a kind, humorous woman whom Pax had, you might say, vetted?

Then too there was the issue of children.

I was hurt when she changed her mind about starting a family, largely because she would offer no solid reason for her decision. Now I know the answer, of course: even then she was thinking she would slip back into her darker side, and a Cyrus or a Reverend Mike or someone she was pursuing on the job might appear at the doorstep one day when the children were home.

Well, intended or not, the receipt has brought me together with Rachel Johnson and her two children.

I take the framed prints back to the storeroom. If we’re right, they’ve served their purpose and, truth is, they really are middling examples of skill.

In the house once more I climb the stairs to the superhero office, which is now my own. I sit at Pax’s desk, on which are two tall stacks of my just-released book, Investigating the Past: A Methodology in Separating Fact from Fiction in Researching History. My publisher has asked me to personalize two dozen copies. They’ll be sent to the media, in hopes of getting publicity.

I open the top book on the stack to the title page and sign with a flourish. Then I thumb to the afterword and read the passage I was writing when I got the call about Pax’s death. It was a month later that I finally completed it.