The Old Neck Fishing and Gardening Club

Note: one of the best pieces of advice I've ever encountered about writing was from a noted author who said above all "write about what you know." Hence the narrator is - you guessed it - a vet. Not exactly a stretch there.



Chapter 3

Two pairs of alarmed eyes were looking at me, and I hated being the center of attention.

“All right,” I said briskly, “no police.” Given the degree of incompetence exhibited by the local law brigade in dealing with even the slightest of misdemeanors, coupled with the general knowledge that if you ever wanted to dispose of a body, Middle Township just outside Polled Neck was the place to do it and get away with it, I figured that since no one was dead despite Patsy’s earliest assumption, , we could simply go into her kitchen, sit down over a cup of coffee, and figure things out. Edna was dozing in the sun, one hip cocked, ears and lower lip drooping, and the dogs were sprawled nearby and snoring. They would be fine, and I could see them from the kitchen window anyway. They were frequent visitors to Patsy’s garden and long ago I had made it clear that dreadful punishments awaited any dogs who decided to entertain themselves by uprooting Patsy’s botanical children. I gestured to the man who was now on his feet, though swaying slightly, and we managed the dozen or so steps to her kitchen door without incident.

Patsy’s cottage was as much a showplace as her garden. The kitchen was a comfortable den of knotty pine paneling that had taken on a warm reddish glow with years of care and elbow grease; a vintage table and chair set that she had rescued from the basement of the Thunder Mug, Polled Neck’s ancient downtown bar, sat in retro splendor next to the picture window that overlooked the garden, and the cottage’s original, shockingly turquoise appliances still chugged obligingly along year after year, having outlasted several generations of repairmen. They had gone well beyond retro into the realm of miraculously cool. When asked by drooling collectors when she planned on replacing them, Patsy inevitably said with a wave of her manicured hand, “when they stop working.” So far, so good.

It was to this homey setting that we helped Patsy’s uninvited guest. He sat down heavily in one of the metallic cushioned chairs and sighed. “Thank you,” he said in a cultured accent that, now that I took the time to listen, was quite clearly Italian. “I am in your debt. “

“You might not be in just a minute,” I said, “let’s get those wounds cleaned up.” I turned to Patsy, who said “I’ll get the first aid kit” and disappeared through the door that led down the hall to the cottage’s tiny bedrooms and bathroom.

“If you don’t want the police, then presumably you don’t want to go to the emergency room either,” I addressed the man who, after clearly trying to decide whether he ought to nod yes or shake no, opted instead for words and said “that is correct.”

“Well, you know we’re going to want to know why. But in the meantime let ‘s get you cleaned up. I’m not a doctor – but I am a veterinarian – so I think I can get you taken care of, if you’re comfortable with that.”

“Entirely comfortable, molti grazie” he said, so I wetted a couple of paper towels at the sink, squirted a small amount of antibacterial hand soap on them, and applied them to the cut on his forehead. He sucked in a breath between his teeth and then relaxed. “If you think this one’s tough,”I remarked , “wait till we get to that arm. We’re going to have to talk about that.” Among other things, I added silently to myself. He nodded, grimacing slightly. “Just so. When your friend gets back---“

At that moment several things happened simultaneously. Patsy was coming back down the hall and had almost reached the kitchen when the front door rattled under someone’s determined knock. Still clearly on edge, she yelped and dropped the first aid kit, which the man gracefully retrieved for her. “Come in,” I called, recognizing that a knock with that degree of authority could only come from our friend Darla Roberson. The dogs out back didn’t care where the knock originated and launched into a flurry of loud barking. In the corner of my vision I saw Edna’s head jerk up when the dogs’ noise disturbed her sleep. Then the door burst open.

“What was that guy doing in your birdba – oh!” Darla stopped in surprise midway through the living room as she saw the stranger reseating himself at the table. “I came as soon as I saw you were bringing him into the house – what the hell were you thinking? A total stranger!!” Privately I wondered the same thing, but I had to admit there was something to this man’s mannerisms that spoke of class – and more importantly of kindness, or maybe innocence. I suppose Patsy and I both felt he merited a chance to explain himself.

“Bon giorno,” the man nodded at Darla, tucking a loose strand of hair behind his left ear. Darla nodded curtly in his direction and thrust out her hand, shaking his in a firm grip designed to intimidate any potential stalker. She was a short, solid woman who would have needed to crane her neck up considerably had the man been standing. As it was, they were nearly eye to eye and she took off her “Neighborhood Watch” ball cap in order to more accurately fix him with a stern blue gaze from behind her round, wire-rimmed glasses. “Who are you?” she demanded bluntly.

“We were just getting to that, Dar,” I said, “but I need to do a little first aid here.” The wound on his temple was clean and had stopped bleeding, so I applied a couple of small bandages, butterfly-fashion, after drying the skin which, I noticed, was disconcertingly warm, smooth and tan. I blinked a couple of times and moved on to his left arm. I held my breath as I peeled away the remains of the shirt sleeve that had stuck to the raw flesh. He gave a visceral grunt but made no other sound.

“Look, this really needs a graft or something, “ I said, “It’s going to leave a nasty scar otherwise.”

He looked alarmed and shook his head again. “Please, no doctors. You do what you have to do. I am healthy – it will heal.”

“Ok,” I said. “What the heck did you do, anyway, catch your arm in something? Did a boat propeller do this to you?”

“No,” he replied, “I was…how do you say it? I was skinned.”

The Old Neck Fishing and Gardening Club

Note: You may want to read the Prologue and Chapter One first! Scroll down!

Chapter 2


I stood shoulder to shoulder with Patsy, surveying the damage.

Patsy’s garden was her pride and joy, her source of solace and strength, the fertile breeding ground for her botanical works of art and, now that I think of it, probably HER place for epiphanies - not to mention daylilies and hydrangeas. After she and her husband Edgar parted company following the rather explosive revelation that not only had he been married before – twice – but he had never exactly bothered to become UNmarried from wife #2 before marrying Patsy, she plunged all her frustrations and energy into her property, transforming a rather humdrum collection of geraniums, boxwood and yew bushes into one of Polled Neck’s landscape showplaces. At this time of year, a profusion of purple and white lilacs spilled over the stone fence next to an antique hitching post where I had tied Edna, but even the fragrant perfume of thousands of tiny flowers, coupled with the smell of the steaming manure pile the pony had obligingly, neatly deposited next to Patsy’s compost heap , failed to mask the pervasive sour odor of alcohol-laced vomit produced by the victim who lay sprawled half in-half out of the birdbath.

This birdbath – and I use the term loosely, because that was how Patsy always referred to it – was in fact a water feature of surprising proportions given the small garden space which it occupied, but the simple fact was, the structure had been there years before the area had been split into tiny lots by some opportunistic vulture of a developer who saw a chance to make a fast buck offering “beachfront” property at exhorbitant rates back in the post World War II economic boom. The once formidable Singer mansion at the intersection of New Jersey Avenue and Morgan Street had been falling to bits for some time until a quorum of Polled Neck residents declared it to be an eyesore of epic proportions; it had subsequently been torn down and the estate divided and subdivided and sprinkled liberally with miniscule cottages that just – barely – met with the existant zoning regulations (no surprise that said regulations were shortly thereafter substantially rewritten until they were tighter than a bikini bottom worn by a middle-aged matron on the first day of beach season, deluded into believing that she still had a girlish figure). Nonetheless the cottages persisted and, as these things inevitably do, came to be viewed as “retro” and soon found themselves in demand again. Patsy was fortunate to have inherited the bungalow her father had purchased soon after being mustered out of the War following a head injury sustained while fighting in the European theater . In any case, the Brelsford family’s miniature estate happened to be the one bit of property which had a piece of architecture remaining from the old Singer buildings – Patsy’s birdbath.

In reality, the “Birdbath” was actually a sort of grotto-esque water feature, complete with several unnecessarily pudgy putti fastened to the back wall so that they gazed down into the pool below them with what I always thought was an expression of rather supercilious fascination.

At the moment they were gazing at the victim.

‘A quick touch on his neck assured me that he still had a pulse, and in fact his color was quite good – tanned skin, flushed cheeks. His breathing was deep and regular. He was rather the worse for wear, however. His dark green uniform shirt was torn at the left shoulder, the right sleeve was missing entirely, and the shirttail was half out of his pants and gaping from the missing bottom button. His khakis were stained and torn at both knees and his hands, though the fingers were long and graceful, were filhy, with broken nails and numerous abrasions. He had fairly long brown hair pulled back into a disheveled ponytail, dusted at the temples with a few strands of grey. Indentations along the bridge of his nose indicated that he wore glasses most of the time though none were evident at the moment.

“He’s not dead, Pats,” I said, “he’s sleeping it off.”

“But what’s THAT?” she fluttered, pointing a pink-enameled index finger at the ground just in front of the stone rim of the pool. I bent over and touched the grass. My finger came back with a brownish red stain.

“Oh. Well, yeah, that’s blood.” Patsy uttered a tiny shriek. I stooped down, shoving aside the dogs who had finally finished their investigation of the garden’s borders and Edna’s manure pile and had come closer to check on what the humans were up to. I discovered a sizeable gash on the side of his head, on the temple closest to the grass, but the blood had clotted and the wound appeared to be fairly superficial. I was pretty sure it would be sore when he came to, however, and also fairly certain that the wound had not been the result of an accident. How the heck would he have met with accident in Patsy’s backyard, after all?

Just then, with my face was only a few inches from his, he groaned. I took a pace back, stepping on Jasper’s toes in the process and eliciting from the startled dog a high, short yap which caused the man to open his eyes. Jasper retreated with his pinched toes and injured feelings to a safer position beneath a bush near Edna, with Coal trailing solicitously after him. Patsy and I retreated also and with good reason, for the man suddenly rolled over, pulling the lower half of his body out of the pool with a splash , and retched painfully into the grass. It was then that I noticed an injury I hadn’t seen before; the movement had caused his torn left sleeve to flap back from his upper arm, revealing another smear of blood and something more: a jagged square of exposed muscle measuring roughly four by four inches. In short, he had been skinned.

“Patsy,” I said, “go call the police.”

“NO!” she yelped and, to my surprise the man simultaneously bellowed the same response.

I turned to stare at her as if she were out of her mind, then came to a decision. “All right,” I agreed, “then go call the club.”

The Old Neck Fishing and Gardening Club

Please note: The prologue is located BELOW this post on the blog and probably should be read first...or not. But it is intended to be read first. Hence the name "prologue." Well, that makes sense. However due to technical difficulties it's... down there. Sorry 'bout that...

Chapter One

The beach is where I have my epiphanies.

Mind you, I can’t count on one every day, and I can’t even predict when they are about to happen, which in any case would run counter to the nature to epiphanies anyway; all I know is, call them what you will, the beach is where I have them.

It could be simply because I’m there most mornings. The truth is, I find it hard to keep away. I was born and raised in Southwest Ohio. The closest we ever came to things nautical were subdivisions in the middle of cornfields centered around muddy ponds and given implausible, or possibly optimistic, monikers such as “Spinnaker’s Row.” Boat sales lots occasionally sprouted near tiny creekbeds which could be counted on to be bone dry for several months at a stretch. Care to take ‘er for a test run, buddy? We’ll ask that old feller with the long beard and lots of breeding pairs of livestock over there and see when the next rain’s coming. I grew up and grew used to feeding animals and growing vegetables, and hoping for downpours at appropriate intervals and toting buckets when they didn’t come, so the ocean – with its infinite and ever-changing quantities of water, continues to hold a lovely fascination for me even though I have lived in this small New Jersey town for going on 5 years now.

Forget the churches filled with congregations dressed in their Sunday best – well, not necessarily “Sunday best” in my case, since I attend Mass on Saturday evenings where the pews are full of people who slide in on their way to or from somewhere else, dressed the part: team members on their way to games, praying for victory, seniors dressed to the nines on their way to celebrate someone’s fiftieth anniversary, families still in shorts back from an afternoon’s picnic. No message for me from the Almighty there, not with the Twitchy Thompson family shuffling their stacks of Holy Cards like angels ready to ante up in a game of celestial Texas Hold’Em, not while PTA matrons whisper during the collection about the way the mayor looks at the girls who carry up the offertory gifts, not with overweight teacher-coaches sitting in massive self-righteousness while assault charges are pending over an incident involving fists at the last Little League game - and that was just with the team members’ mothers.

Nope, for me it’s definitely the beach, so it’s no surprise that my story, the story of the village of Old Neck and its Fishing and Gardening Club, should begin, precisely, on the beach.

Old Neck. Our town really isn’t named Old Neck. Officially it’s Polled Neck, founded in the late 1600’s, a vacation town in its glory days back in the last century but sliding decidedly downhill in the past fifty years or so, losing most of the younger, prosperous vacationers to glitzier “down the shore” localities such as Atlantic City, and funkier joints like Seaside. In its heyday Polled Neck had entertained Cabinet members, provided movie stars with quiet spots for weekend trysts, even - rumor had it – served as a hideaway for pirates and privateers ducking into its back bay to take on fresh water at Reed Pond before heading out again to the open ocean. It has a long history, does our little town, but as the more youthful, progressive members of the populace left to find greener pastures, so to speak, the balance of the demographic shifted decidedly in the direction of the over-fifty crowd, and some smart ass shortened its hallowed name to OLD Neck.

Old, Polled. It doesn’t matter. It has a lovely beach, and if our town is a little quieter than it used to be, we are all right with that. The seaside establishments have been busy enough to keep us more or less solvent during the summer and allow us to put a little money by for the slow season, and life goes on. As our friend Joe says, “it’s all good.” And it pretty much is, although with the recent economic downturn we are definitely living a little closer to the edge of the poverty line.

So , as always, back to the beach. This particular late spring morning found me ambling toward the rising sun with two of our dogs, Jasper the chocolate Labrador retriever and Coal the almost-lab, loudly wrestling each other to the sand, and Edna strolling along behind me at the end of her lead. I was zigzagging back and forth between searching the detritus at the high tide mark for beach glass, a rare commodity in these recycle-conscious days, and trying to find that “sweet spot” along the edge of the water where the sand is most comfortable for walking. Edna was following a line of her own, sniffing hopefully at beach vegetation and wilted seaweed in search of something edible, occasionally blowing at some strange piece of driftwood or horseshoe crab carcass that bobbled in the surf. Tiny shore birds skittered ahead of us. The beach was quiet that morning and the ocean was calm, the waves rolling smoothly over onto the sand like sated lovers.

I was savoring the smell of bacon drifting beachward from some occupied vacation cottage, and grinned to myself. Why does a seashore vacation make ordinarily health-conscious individuals want to consume pounds of bacon – perhaps it is the sight of bathers slathered in oil sizzling on the beach?

There you go. A little epiphany, but an epiphany nonetheless. Was it too small to keep – should I throw it back? I was idly trying to decide when in the distance I spotted a woman hurrying in my direction, shirt and pantlegs flapping in the offshore breeze. Jasper and Coal had recognized her and were racing in her direction, spurts of sand flying from beneath their paws. I recognized my friend Patsy. She appeared to be in some state of agitation: her usually neat, short brown hair was flapping over a hurriedly donned visor and her brown eyes, I could see as she drew closer, were huge. I tugged Edna’s head from a particularly appealing patch of beach grass and adjusted our trajectory to meet her. She grabbed me by the wrist, panting. Her carefully manicured nails dug into my skin. As she stopped to catch her breath I said, “Hey, girl - did you find a body on the beach, or what?” Sometimes despite my best efforts my Ohio roots break through; the midwesterner’s alternative to nearly everything is “erwhut.”
“No Teddy,” she gasps, “it’s worse than that!”
I couldn’t magine anything worse than finding a “floater” and I was just about to tell her so when she added, “He’s in my birdbath!”

The Old Neck Fishing and Gardening Club

PROLOGUE


A Midwestern horse show grounds on a hot, dusty July day. Riders walking, trotting, galloping their mounts in every direction, warming up, cooling down. An announcer’s cultured voice floating out over the crowd describes completed rounds, refusals and occasionally “an unfortunate parting of the ways,” the dreadfully polite and politely dreadful expression she uses to report a fall.

In the start box, a woman sits quietly on a small bay mare. The starter counts down beginning at “thirty seconds…twenty seconds…ten, nine, eight…three, two,one, go, have a safe ride!” “Thank you,” the woman calls over her shoulder after touching her heels to the pony’s sides. The pair canters easily, rhythmically to the first jump, a table, and sails over, the black tail of the pony teasing the air in her passing. They have done this before, many times, often winning. Somewhere in the area of the start box the announcer notes to the crowd that “number 126, Hilltop Edna Brown, and owner/ rider Theodora Lewis, are on course and have successfully cleared the first obstacle.”

Seconds pass, and the only sound the rider hears is the rhythmic pounding of the pony’s hooves across the dusty grass. The pony clears a fence of stacked timbers, then wheels around a pond toward a red painted coop. At that instant the unpredictable, the unplanned, happens. A tiny, excited Jack Russell Terrier escapes from his owner’s grasp and runs toward the approaching pair, barking furiously. The pony, no stranger to dogs, sidesteps to the right at the last minute to avoid crushing the diminutive canine but the rider’s momentum carries her forward, off the pony’s left shoulder, onto and then over the coop, her boots thudding against the hollow structure as her head and shoulders plow into the turf. She has time to register that she is still holding the reins, and then the darkness comes.