Caged Spirits

By John Joseph Stanley

Los Angeles County Sheriffs Lieutenant Gary Conner leads an idyllic life with his wife, Gwen, and their beautiful daughter, Jennie. On a usual day, something unusual happens: seven-year-old Jennie decides its finally time to ride her bike. This leads to tragedy as Jennie is struck and killed, leaving Gary and Gwen to drown in sorrow.

To dull their pain, Gary takes a position far from home as the captain of a county jail in northern New Mexico. His detention center appears to have an inordinate number of problems. Then, with reports of a man who walks through walls, Gary realizes he deals not only with human criminals but dark, tormented powers of the supernatural variety.

The ghosts at Garys jail are on both sides of the bars. They are caged spirits, held not by metal and mortar alone. Gary must find a way to resolve ancient battles or risk losing everything he holds dear. His own pain and the pain of his wife keep them caged, as well, but by setting the jails spirits free, he might free his heart and hers before its too late.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9781491761663

John Joseph Stanley

John Joseph Stanley has won awards for his fiction and historical nonfiction. He spent many years serving in law enforcement and corrections as a peace officer. Caged Spirits is his first novel.

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CAGED SPIRITS

Copyright © 2015 John Joseph Stanley.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-6167-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-6168-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-6166-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015903235

iUniverse rev. date: 07/02/2015

Contents

Dedication

I – Flight from Pedal Error

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

II – A Colorful Command

8

9

10

11

12

III – The First Death/The CO’s Quarters’ New Residents

13

14

15

16

17

IV – Colin Crescent

18

19

20

V – First CO’s Quarters’ Searches

21

22

VI – The Fun Starts

23

24

VII – Colonel Becker’s Troubles/Gwen’s Secret

25

26

27

VIII – Smoke Hill Revelation & Déjà vu Plus

28

29

IX – The Tire Store Owner’s Message

30

X – A Search Among Tombstones/Doors & Disturbances

31

32

33

34

XI – Gwen’s Art Exhibit/Colonel Becker’s Counsel

35

36

37

XII – Dismissing the Spirits

38

39

Epilogue – Uncaged Spirits

From Whence Cage The Spirit Of This Story Sprung

Dedication

For my Mother and Father, who put the first book of adult fiction in my hands when I was only eight-years-old

I – Flight from Pedal Error

1

I’d spent most of my waking hours inside cages. Walled in and barred off, I’d heard more than my share of gates being slammed shut and bars being racked closed. It didn’t matter whether you sat behind glass, or brick or steel. It was all the same. You were locked down.

Locked down. I used to think that term only applied to the incarcerated criminals I watched as a jail guard.

But I realized how naïve an idea that was. Anyone could be locked down. Most of our lockdowns were self-imposed. What I did not know was that it was not only the living who could be trapped in cages. The dead could be trapped there, too.

My wife, Gwen, and I knew about death. We lost our precious daughter, Jennie, on her seventh birthday.

Jennie was a miracle baby, one that doctors said we couldn’t have. She inherited beautiful amber hair and bright blue eyes from her mother and a tall, lean form from me. Sprout was my name for her, because she took after me and shot up like a tree. Her amber hair, cobalt eyes and beauty she got from her mother.

Jennie brightened our lives, made them so much richer, until the afternoon of her seventh birthday.

When Gwen brought her home from school that day, I was waiting in the garage with her present – a brand new bike, affixed with yellow and blue streamers to the handlebars, Jennie’s favorite colors.

I still remembered the look on my sweet little girl’s face when she saw her bright blue bike in the garage with those streamers fluttering in the breeze. She couldn’t wait to get out of the car. Gwen wouldn’t let her go for a ride until she took about two dozen photos and then made sure her safety helmet was snapped on good and tight.

I remembered picking up that safety helmet after the accident. Norbert Chambers’ Cadillac hit her with such force that the helmet was knocked off her head.

Pedal error.

That was what they called it. Chambers was ninety-one-years old and a former World War II bomber pilot. He had liver spots on his hands, and his hair grew in thin, white wisps across his mostly bald head. He flew B-25s with the 5th Air Force in the Pacific, where he skip bombed Japanese ships. That act took real skill. It required the pilot to fly at low altitude just above the ships’ masts. But on the day he came barreling down our street toward my little girl, the passing of decades meant he couldn’t tell the difference between the accelerator and the brake.

He was crying almost as hard as we were when he finally stopped the car and we caught up with him.

His cage closed in around him quickly. He died three months later, long before they brought him to trial. Gwen showed no emotion when I told her the news of his death. She was doodling circles on a pad while twirling a blonde lock with her opposite hand. The speed of neither motion changed. A barely audible puffed exhale was her only discernible reaction. My response was to put on my running shoes and take an unusually long trek through the hills. By the time I arrived home, evidence of the sunset was a red gash across the western sky and Gwen was already in bed. She retreated there earlier and earlier each night.

Neither of us spoke of Norbert Chambers again, though he’d become an ever-present part of our lives.

The cage drawing down around Gwen and I closed in much slower. But its growing presence felt inextricable and relentless. Everywhere we looked we saw Jennie. I, at least, could escape to work, which was ironic since I was the operation’s lieutenant at Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles. Yet, the only place of refuge from my pain was behind bars in one of the largest cages in the free world.

There was no such place for Gwen. She was an artist who painted the interior of the homes of the rich and wannabe famous. I don’t mean she helped them decide whether peach or apricot would look nicer on the walls of their breakfast nook and then slapped on a couple of coats. She did original artwork or reproductions on their walls or ceilings. She painted the Last Supper for a televangelist’s home in Newport Beach. Not Di Vinci’s, of course. After what Dan Brown did with that one, the televangelist would not here of Leonardo’s Last Supper in his home. She did Jacobo Bassano’s 16th century version where the apostles were all a flutter after Jesus announced that one of them would betray him. Of course, the televangelist wanted his likeness as the Apostle John. She accommodated him, but also included a less obvious version of him as Judas. She hadn’t liked the way he’d looked at her while she was on the ladder.

A Hollywood producer asked her to paint the center panel of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling over the entryway of his house in Beverly Hills. The producer’s opinion of himself was even loftier than the televangelist’s. He wanted his likeness to be on the face of God. The angels were to be all of the stars from his long list of feature films and Adam was to be his current lover. At least there was no need to worry about how he looked at her when she was aloft on the scaffolding.

She painted Jennie’s face on one of the cherubs. If she could, she always tried to work Jennie into her paintings. Poetic license, Gwen called it. She did it so subtly that her clients never knew. In the reproduction of Bassano’s Last Supper, she gave the cat at the bottom right corner of the painting Jennie’s face. It only made sense. Jennie became her muse, and before she started pre-school Gwen took her with her to all her assignments.

She was the perfect baby, our Jennie. She never made a fuss. Gwen’s customers never minded our little cherub being there.

When I discovered that Gwen stopped painting after Jennie died, I realized that she moved out of the cell that she and I shared together and into one of her own. Once there, she began to slip farther and farther into its deep recesses until there were times when I couldn’t see her at all.

We tried counseling, but we backed out after a couple of sessions. Gwen said it was just too soon. She wanted to mourn without being made to feel guilty for it. Then, we just never went back. I lied to myself and said that we could turn to friends and family for help, but there really was no support network for Gwen and me. Her parents were gone and her sister, Kathryn, lived far away working as a software consultant in Charlotte, North Carolina. Gwen always was a bit of a loner. Maybe not quite Emily Dickinson with a paintbrush, but she didn’t have a retinue of girlfriends she confided in. It didn’t take long for the young mothers she knew through Jennie’s school to distance themselves from her. It was as if they feared that losing your child to an old bomber pilot who should have been permanently grounded from driving years before might be contagious.

Only Gayle Phillips, her agent, persevered against Gwen’s vacant cobalt eyes. She kept encouraging her to work, though Gwen demurred. She suggested lunch, though Gwen expressed disinterest. She kept calling, though Gwen had little to say. Without Gayle’s persistence, I think Gwen could have retreated so far into one of the crevasses of her cell she might have slipped away from me for good.

But still, I was losing her.

Of that there was no doubt.

If I didn’t do something, one day her cell would take her.

It wasn’t like I had the greatest support system, either. My best friend was my work. When I wanted to take out my frustration and lose myself in something else, I laced up my running shoes and banged out five to ten miles. My family was almost as far away as Gwen’s. My brother, Dennis, and his family lived in Austin, Texas. Dennis’s a good guy. He let me cry on his shoulder at Jennie’s funeral, but he and Carrie had three kids of their own and a law firm to run. He also had Mom to keep an eye on. Dad died of a stroke ten years back and she lived in a nursing home. Whenever Dennis visited, she called him by my father’s name and asked him why he abandoned her there. Dennis had his hands full without hearing from me about my problems.

So there was no family network of support nearby for me, either. And when it came to making bosom buddies, I was not much better than Gwen. No one would think of me as J.D. Salinger with a Beretta, but twenty-five plus years in law enforcement taught me how to be stoic in the face of pain and suffering. I preferred action to introspection. Yet, Jennie’s death and Gwen’s suffering drove me into deep recesses of my own that I wasn’t sure how to escape.

We attended a very large church in West Covina, one of those mega churches that provided plenty of space to hide out, something at which Gwen and I excelled. We both felt utterly hopeless and alone and offered little meaningful help for each other.

I doubt any place on the globe exists where a greater concentration of people are pressed in so tightly together and, yet, who feel more utterly alone than in Southern California. Everybody moves so fast here that they do their best not to notice their loneliness. But Gwen and I noticed. We noticed it every time we walked by Jennie’s empty room. We noticed it every time we looked at each other, wanting to say something and then saying nothing. It was impossible for us not to notice. The fact that I sought relief for my despair and loneliness in a jail tells you just how bad it was.

2

Then one quiet day, when the building tension in our home was curled up in a ball asleep, I got the call from Dale Marvin in Estrella, New Mexico.

I worked for Dale briefly. He was my lieutenant at Custody Headquarters Training for about four months before I got promoted to lieutenant myself. He was one of those guys with an infectious smile. He just seemed so damn happy to be there. And after his predecessor, a man with a hangdog look and deeply sunken eyes, who came into the unit convinced that we were all a bunch of under-achieving prima donnas and left thinking that his brilliant leadership squared us all away, Dale was like Noah’s rainbow after the flood. We were all happy to have him. About a year after I promoted, he made captain and everybody at Custody Training was as happy for him as they were sad to see him go. Three years later, he was retired and gone. I had no idea where. His out of the blue phone call filled me in.

When Dale called, I was waging war against the wall of juniper bushes that had merged into one chaotic green monstrosity at the back of our property due to my neglect. Hacking away at that beast was possible. The one growing inside me since Jennie’s death still eluded my reach.

Gary Conner, how are you? Dale’s warm voice rumbled from the other end of the line.

All right. How is retired life treating you, Dale?

Well, some of us just weren’t meant for retirement, Gary. I figure I’ll call it retirement when the Lord calls me home. Heck, probably not even then. I figure he’ll probably put me right to work on something that needs fixing.

I wondered what work the Lord assigned to Jennie.

I hear that. Well, you did retire from the sheriff’s department. So what are you doing now?

Just couldn’t stay out of law enforcement, Gary. I bought myself a piece of land in Eagle County, New Mexico years ago. That’s near Taos, just south of Colorado. Thought I’d enjoy nice, quiet retirement hunting and cross country skiing, but I wasn’t crazy about what I saw in the sheriff’s department here. Got the notion to go after the top job and got myself elected.

Well, congratulations, Sheriff Marvin! I’m sure you’ll do great.

Yeah, well trying to do that is why I’m calling you. Eagle County S.D. is not anything like the LASD. We’ve only got two hundred and ninety employees, and that includes all the support personnel as well as the sworn staff.

We have almost that many on day shift at CJ.

That’s actually a big number for these parts. And the reason it is so high is because of the Lomax Detention Facility. About eighteen years ago, the county turned down a referendum to build a new jail in downtown Estrella. The old one was over seventy years old and falling apart. Sheriff Peter Lomax was so pissed that he closed the jail down and shipped all the prisoners out to an old World War II Army Air Force training base. They’d been using it for decades as their honor farm for low security inmates. Well, Lomax gets the notion to raise the money for a modern jail on his own so he goes into business with the Feds and soon they’re taking in a flock of federal detainees.

Just like we did at Mira Loma until the Feds kicked us to the curb. Mira Loma Detention Facility was in the high desert seventy-five miles north of downtown Los Angeles in Lancaster. At one point, it held as many as nine hundred detainees. It was a nice side business for the LASD. Then the Federal government pulled up its tents and went elsewhere, like New Mexico.

Yes, exactly. I think Lomax got the idea from us. Now with Mira Loma no longer in the game the Lomax Facility is the largest of its kind in the country.

Way out there in Nowhere, New Mexico?

Well, it isn’t exactly nowhere, Gary. But you can almost see it from here. The problem is that the Lomax facility has become unwieldy. After Lomax died his successor didn’t know what to do with it and appointed a captain to run it with no corrections background and zero people skills. That captain moved on, but things aren’t much better. Morale sucks and I’m worried our Uncle Sam may grow unhappy. The LASD already saw what happens when Dear Uncle gets moody. Eagle County has a lot more to lose if Washington decides to take its business elsewhere than L.A. County did.

Sounds like you’ve got quite a problem there, Dale. I was wondering where he was going with this.

I wish it were that simple. The sheriff I replaced left me a few other problems. We had a little sex scandal in our court. Seems the lieutenant over there believed in quid pro quo for job assignments. All the cars in our patrol division are falling apart. A repair company that they hired was allegedly greasing the ex-sheriff’s palm and doing shoddy work so we had to hire our own mechanics to deal with it. Our patrol guys haven’t had decent training in four years. The range is antiquated and our best recruits are going elsewhere, and many of our best people with them.

And you wanted this job why?

The problems are bad, Gary, but they can all be fixed. There are still some good people here, although my undersheriff is a pain in the ass and I’m stuck with him for political reasons. But I’ve already addressed the sexual harassment issue, though it’s probably going to cost Eagle County a few bucks, and the county commissioners just passed a motion giving us the funds to upgrade our fleet and repair our training facilities.

Eagle County’s problems sounded a lot like what we recently went through at the LASD on a smaller scale.

Well, you always were an efficient manager, Dale. But my guess is you didn’t just call me from Near Nowhere, New Mexico to share the ups and downs of your new job as an executive.

No. I guess I took the long way around the mountain to get to my point, as my old man used to say, but I needed to lay my situation out for you anyway before I got down to it.

Got down to what?

Look, Gary, I talked to Chad Lander before I talked to you. Your captain thinks a lot of you, a whole lot. He says you’re an excellent number two man and you’ve got their training program humming.

That’s nice of Chad to say. But I’ve got a great training sergeant and the lieutenants and sergeants inside security do a great job. Everyone is playing a good game of catch up after some tough times. Besides, I don’t think a fifty-plus-year-old jail can actually hum. It sort of creaks and groans.

See, that’s like you. You always share your accomplishments with others and know how to empower people.

Okay, Dale, the last time I was buttered up this much I was told I was the perfect man to be placed on the grill as the PM watch commander at Compton Station. Exactly where are you going with this?

Chad told me about the loss of your daughter, Gary. I’m sorry. I realize it’s been almost four months now, but I know how difficult that can be. I watched what my brother went through after he lost his son in Iraq, and I remember what becoming a father meant to you.

Dale’s kind words immediately pushed me deeper into my cell. The reason I was standing in my backyard with the hacked fragments of juniper tentacles at my feet was that I just got off work after being cooped up in the watch commander’s office inside the jail. Two of our new lieutenants were attending middle management school for the week and I was filling in for one of them. There are no windows inside Men’s Central Jail. They were walled up and painted over decades ago. No outside light ever gets in. You never know what time of day it is. It’s like working inside a submarine. The dark and cold inside that office encouraged me to get outside and wage war against the junipers. Dale’s words caused that cold darkness to hover about me and eclipsed the warm heat of the San Gabriel Valley afternoon.

My wife and I are dealing with it.

But not very well, not very well at all.

I’m sure you are. Your wife, Gwen isn’t it? She is a painter, as I recall.

Yes. It was like Dale to remember details like that. He remembered the little things about his people. It was one of the things that made him such a good leader.

How is she doing?

The darkness intensified. My cellphone felt cold against my ear.

Gary?

I took a deep breath before answering. Look, Dale. It’s been hard. We’re doing the best we can. I appreciate your concern and all the problems you’re going through back there, but I don’t really want to talk about my situation.

I understand. You’re a very passionate guy, Gary. That’s why you married an artist. Listen, I’m going to get right to it. I want you to come and work for me. I want you to be the captain out at Lomax and help me straighten it out. I’ve got my hands full with the court and patrol side. I need somebody I can trust to deal with the jail.

You’re joking.

Serious as a hand grenade in a fox hole. I called Chad looking for someone who might be able to help me. I had no idea you were back at CJ. After I found out what you’ve been doing for him for the past fourteen months I knew you were the perfect man.

I wasn’t thinking about retirement, Dale.

Don’t think of it as retirement. It’s a promotion and a job change. Look, you’ve done your twenty-five plus years there and you turn fifty in a month. Those numbers make it work for you. And though what Eagle County will pay you as a captain is barely what a top step deputy makes there, it ought to supplement your retirement nicely.

I should have told him thanks, but no thanks. I should have wished him well and moved on to hacking away at the rest of the junipers. That would have been the smart thing to do. Instead I said, Okay, Dale. But that’s quite a life change. Let me talk to Gwen about it. I’ll get back to you.

3

Gwen thought it was a great idea less than five minutes after I shared it with her.

If I was smart, her rapid acquiescence should have had the same effect on me as a 998 call of a deputy involved shooting did. Logic told me that her reaction made no sense.

Leaving everything we had and everything we knew and hauling ourselves to northern New Mexico was a huge decision. That Gwen bought into the notion five minutes after I broached the possibility was completely out of character for her. This was a woman who told me not to discuss marriage with her for the first ten months we dated, and then when we did discuss it, it took another six months before she agreed to marry me. Next came ten months of engagement when she agonized over every detail of the ceremony and the honeymoon. It took her six years to find a house she was willing to buy. Every detail was meticulously researched, mulled over, considered and reconsidered, not the least of which was that the light had to be just right for painting.

Gwen was a woman who stressed over the kind of paper towel holder we had in the kitchen and whether the hand towels in the bathroom had fringe on them or not. She took her time making every big decision we made.

Now, after a five-minute conversation, we were on the road to Estrella, New Mexico. The fact that my own internal alarm bells remained unmoved after Gwen’s enthusiastic endorsement of this proposal served as testimony to the numbed state of my own emotions.

Dale was thrilled when I called him and told him of my decision. He wanted me there as soon as possible, but we agreed that it would take me about twelve to sixteen weeks to get my affairs in order in Southern California. That wasn’t a lot of time to retire, sell our house, find a new house in Estrella, and pack and move to New Mexico, but he was up against time constraints on his end. He told me bringing in someone from outside was not viewed with wild enthusiasm by the locals. He wanted me to fly back there as soon as possible so that he could introduce me to the Eagle County Commissioners and the rest of his command staff.

Nobody likes being the new guy, but I was also going to be the unpopular outsider, at least until people got to know me. And then there was the little bit that Dale left out when he made me the job offer.

There’s just something not right out at Lomax, Gary. There’s something going on out there I can’t put my finger on. I’m hoping you can nail it down.

Dale’s words at last started some motion in my internal alarm bells that Gwen’s enthusiasm about the move to New Mexico could not.

I’d seen it all at Men’s Central Jail. Everything crosses the operations lieutenant’s desk before it gets to the captain’s desk. We had murders, allegations of excessive force by deputies, smuggling in of contraband for the inmates by staff, off-duty misconduct, and the usual issues of malingering, laziness, apathy and indifference that you see in any large command doing more with less in a building that was falling apart. Most recently, we were dealing with our past sins regarding the failure to supervise our personnel and regulate the use of force. Now there were cameras everywhere and every day felt like you were submitting yourself to a proctology examination. It was hard for me to imagine that the tiny Lomax Facility would provide anything surprising.

What do you mean, ‘not right,’ Dale?

It’s just… well, we had a suicide last month, an accidental death and three other bizarre injuries.

That sounds like rather pedestrian stuff.

I’m not talking about our inmates and detainees, Gary. That was the staff. And all of it was on duty.

What? You’re joking.

I wish I was. Kyle Anderson was a quiet, simple guy. People liked him. He’d been a correctional deputy for twenty-seven years, very diligent worker, never a problem. His wife ran off with her art teacher, another woman. Kyle hung himself from the Lomax water tower.

Rough, but that happens.

Yeah, but then there was Andrew Jacobson. He was our head electrician. He was working on a power failure in one of the barracks when he stumbled and was impaled on a broken fence pole.

Damn, that’s a terrible way to go, but that was an accident, right?

So the coroner said. But Lomax has just had an inordinate share of accidents lately. Another employee lost a finger when a door blew shut on his hand on a day when there was no wind. Another was hurt when a rain gutter suddenly fell off of a roof and broke his shoulder and almost sliced off his right ear. And a third employee insists he dislocated his elbow when he was pushed into a ditch while doing a perimeter walk.

Well, I hope whoever pushed him did some days off.

That’s just it, Gary. There was no one there. He was on a perimeter walk by himself and there was nobody within a hundred yards of him.

What is the guy, some kind of nut?

I wish he were. He was Lomax’s best watch commander before he transferred out to patrol. Tom Clark won a bronze star in the first Gulf War. The guy was a Ranger and as big as an NFL lineman. He’s not the kind of guy to make something like that up.

Security camera footage?

The footage showed Tom approaching the ditch, then ten seconds of snow, then Tom clawing his way out of the ditch. There was no explanation for the glitch.

The clappers in my inner alarm bells began striking the bell walls with enthusiasm when Dale said that.

Well, what does he think happened?

Tom may be a pragmatic guy, but he’s a New Mexico native. Don’t forget Los Alamos is in this state as well as Roswell. Conspiracy theories, cattle mutilations and stories about little gray men with big heads and black eyes abound.

So he thinks it was a mad scientist working with a cult of aliens.

No, not exactly. Tom figured it was somebody conducting an experiment with a directed energy weapon. He said only another man his size could knock him down like that. Since no one was there, he figures it has to be some kind of secret government project. Tom says that explains the other injuries, as well. Maybe even Andrew Jacobson’s death, since he was already dead when he was found and nobody got to ask him how he fell.

And you believe that?

I don’t know what to believe, Gary. It makes more sense than some of the other crazy notions that are being tossed around.

Dale, I’m familiar with the technology Lieutenant Clark was talking about. It’s not that ultra-secret. I’ve seen it at the techno geek company that designed it in Buena Park. Essentially, it’s a large barrel shaped device mounted on a tripod that fires a burst of compressed air, I said, glad to have at least the lead on a solid theory. The thing in Buena Park would knock your man down, but they are not exactly tiny and they have a limited range. Unlikely someone could get one close enough to the prison to use it.

Okay, Dale replied, after I shot down my own good theory. Then what dropped him?

I have no idea.

Well, maybe you can help figure it out when you get here. I was counting on your knowledge of less lethal weapons to help modernize the department, but maybe you can use it to solve our mystery out at Lomax.

I doubt it was a less lethal, Dale.

Well, maybe, to be certain, you can check with some of your friends at that company in Buena Park and confirm one of their prototypes, more powerful than what you saw, didn’t just walk away.

There was just something in his voice that sounded odd. There was a slight tremor there and he finished his suggestion that I double check on the less lethal weapon with a nervous laugh. Whatever was happening at Lomax had him rattled. So I decided to drop it and move on to the details of my visit to New Mexico.

After I hung up the phone with Dale, I asked myself if I really wanted to deal with all the headaches of being a jail administrator at a facility I did not know. CJ was difficult enough, but it sounded like the problems at Lomax were even more complicated than Dale was telling me. I liked a mystery as well as the next guy, but was I really up to this?

We all have a sixth sense. It is that little voice that tells us: don’t go to the bank today; take another route home tonight; I think today would be a bad day for a run…. or don’t quit your job and take your grief-stricken wife to Nowhere, New Mexico, because there is bad karma there. Sometimes, we listen to that voice. Sometimes, we don’t and nothing happens. But there are times when we don’t listen to the voice and are almost run over by a bus. And other times, when we ignore it, we are almost run over by something a whole lot worse.

4

Despite Dale’s call, once the decision was made to leave the LASD and take the job at Lomax, I tossed myself into the details of the move like a general moving with haste to muster his forces for deployment into combat. It was one more diversion, another list of busy work that kept me from thinking about Jennie.

In the beginning all this bustle seemed good for Gwen, as well. She began reading everything she could about northern New Mexico. Taos was just a stone’s throw from Estrella and she liked everything she saw in the area. It had a similar tradition as an artist’s conclave as Santa Fe, but it was more laid back. We passed through Taos on the last vacation we took with Jennie. We liked the warmth of the people and the leisurely pace. We stopped for lunch there at a little courtyard restaurant with a large bubbling fountain in its center where brightly colored birds were dipping and diving and bathing themselves. Jennie loved the birds. We ate quesadillas and chicken tacos and were surrounded by adobe walls and the looming majesty of the nearby Sangre de Cristo Mountains. It was enchanting and spoiled Santa Fe for us. Santa Fe seem like it belonged in Southern California after Taos. Gwen had fond memories of Taos. Everything she downloaded on the Internet about nearby Estrella and Eagle County looked just as appealing to her.

I was just happy to see her excited and interested in something again. I thought it proved she was finally on the road to recovery from losing Jennie.

I was wrong.

But she seemed to embrace this move with optimism and enthusiasm. It was so good to see her vibrant again and excited.

After I finished my disconcerting call with Dale, I found her in her studio painting. It was the first time I found her sitting in front of a canvas with a brush in her hand since before Jennie died. I wanted to express my concerns after what Dale told me, but I just stood at the door for a moment and watched her.

When Gwen painted, she left the planet. I didn’t know how else to describe it. She was barely aware of her surroundings. She possessed this amazing ability to focus. All the light and energy in the world seemed crowded out around her and all that got through radiated off the canvas in front of her. When I came upon her dialed in like this, I’d learned to just wait until she noticed me. Breaking her out of this trance had the same effect as waking a sleepwalker. It confused and disoriented her for several seconds. This used to worry me the first couple of times I saw it happen; then, I learned to just gradually enter her peripheral vision until I began to register with her.

Gwen had an entirely different relationship with Jennie when she was painting. Gwen knew Jennie’s whereabouts at all times. I always thought it was just a mother-daughter thing. I never suspected any more to it. But even when Jennie tiptoed into a room while Gwen had paintbrush in hand, her mother knew it and stopped what she was doing; then, she put her on her lap or drew her to her side. It never worked that way with me.

So I stood at the door and watched her. Gwen tied her shoulder length strawberry hair back with a gold ribbon. She liked to lean in toward the canvas and did not want to be distracted by a meddlesome lock that might stray in front of her eyes. She wore a pair of tan shorts and one of my old sergeant’s shirts with the patches removed but the stripes still on the sleeves. As she inclined forward from her stool, one foot flat on the floor and the other raised up on her toes showing the lovely curve of her calf, she looked extremely beautiful, more so because she was making no effort to be beautiful. This was just Gwen being Gwen. I knew she wore no makeup and if I was in front of her, I would see tiny lines between her eyes as she wrinkled her nose and strained to focus through a pair of black framed reading glasses that were no longer strong enough for her bright blue eyes. Her farsightedness was the only thing flawed about her eyes.

Did I mention that Jennie had those eyes, too? Jennie inherited so much from her mother. So very much.

I just stood there for several minutes staring at Gwen. She was working on a landscape – mountains in the distance with dollops of flowing clouds moving across their peeks, a long flowing meadow in fall colors that showed the waning life of the year, but in the foreground there was a high barbwire fence. The fence seemed odd. It was not the fence one might expect separating one piece of ranch property from another. It was far too tall with razor wire across its top. That harsh fence maligned the beauty of the meadows and the mountains in the distance. Hard packed earth stood in the immediate foreground and a crushed gravel road on the opposite side of the fence. A long shadow lay across that road, its owner out of view.

When Gwen got going, she painted with amazing speed. I didn’t even know she was painting again. Now an 18 x 30 canvas neared completion. As I watched her, she added final details to something at the heart of her painting. It appeared to be the face of an animal, a coyote. The animal was in the lower center of the canvas standing between two thick bushes. It seemed to be watching the owner of that shadow. The animal looked large and hungry and he appeared to be sizing up the shadow to determine if its owner might be breakfast. Apprehension for the owner of that shadow crept over me, testimony to Gwen’s talent.

I know Gwen’s technique. Knowing her, she started with that coyote and painted everything else around it. When she displayed the paining on a wall the eyes of that animal would follow the viewer around the room. The beauty of the landscape and the mystery of the barbwire fence stuck with me, the contrast between the two, freedom versus confinement, known predator versus unknown prey, gave the painting an eerie, uncomfortable mood.

The technique and talent in the art reflected Gwen’s great gift, but this painting differed from her others. Usually, a certain whimsy moved through her art, reflecting optimism and possibility. But this painting offered a darker tone, of something lost, or about to be.

I inched my way slowly into her peripheral vision. I saw how focused she was on the face of the coyote. Her lips were pursed in a concerted pout. It seemed her entire world was no thicker than the width of the hairs on her paintbrush as she teased the coyote’s face to life. I watched Gwen paint over many years. I knew how locked on she got, but this concentration seemed different; something almost desperate seemed to guide her hand and it translated to her face. I no more recognized the expression I saw there than I did the theme of this painting.

Finally, I was compelled to speak. I was only a half a dozen feet away and she still hadn’t acknowledged me.

I waited until her brush was withdrawn an inch from the canvas before I said, That’s quite a landscape.

That’s all it took and the mask cracked and she broke into a broad smile. I loved that smile. She could melt metal with that smile. It melted my heart to see it on her face again. The last time I remembered seeing it was when Jennie was pedaling away toward her rendezvous with her one-sided battle with Norbert Chambers’ Cadillac. When I saw that smile, I let go of some of my apprehensions about moving Gwen to northern New Mexico.

Isn’t it beautiful? It’s New Mexico, near Estrella. I saw a picture on the Internet that inspired it.

Absent the high barbwire fence, it might be beautiful, well, absent that and the long shadow being sized up by the coyote. There was something about that dog that disturbed me. Gwen painted him too well. He kept staring at me. I was afraid that if I looked at him long enough, he would blink.

And the razor wire fence. Was that in the picture, too?

No, silly. That’s the view from your jail. Don’t all jails have high fences? She said this with a shake of her head and the brushing of an imaginary bang off her face with the