Chapter 3

I didn’t hear any more about Kendal Caldwell or from Jimmy the rest of the week. Management team meeting that Thursday was all about parking problems, an upcoming state program audit of SAR, and a new inter-program referral form.

Monday, June 10

It was the following Monday morning when the phone beep-beeped again.

“Mental Health, this is Gary.”

“So, I bet you feel better, right?”

“Better about what, Tate? Or are you calling to tell me you’re going to barbecue some more chicken. I could eat that three times a week.”

“No, about the Caldwell kid, you oinker.”

“Caldwell? What now?”

“About the autopsy findings?”

“Autopsy, what? Is this a guessing game? What are the rules? Like Twenty Questions?”

“No, you dunce. About the bullet wound that the state coroner found. About the fact that Caldwell was dead before he went off that bridge. Didn’t Jimmy tell you? I saw him on Thursday morning, asked him to pass it along. Figured you’d enjoy watching him eat crow.”

“Hell, no. This is the first I’ve heard about it, that sonuvabitch never said a thing. But this is official? It wasn’t a suicide? But who in hell would shoot the guy? Besides me, I mean. Actually, I was more inclined to kick him to death. Ah, what am I saying? The poor slob’s still dead.”

“You’re just feeling relieved, Doctor Dufus. But yeah, it’s official. The OCI investigators are goin’ back up there this afternoon. I’m goin’ along.”

“I’ll say this, it feels pretty damn odd to feel so good about someone being shot. Crap, I got ‘a tell Greta.”

“Go ahead, ride the wave. Maybe I’ll know more after I see what the staties are looking at.”

“Thanks a lot, Tate. I can’t tell you how relieved I am. Talk to you later.”

Greta wasn’t in her office and her cell went to voice mail. We usually ate lunch together, whatever the bakery was making, so I caught up with her there at noon.

“You know that Caldwell kid, the suicide up at the Junction?” I blurted out as soon as I stood next to her. “Turns out he was shot to death and his body was dropped off the bridge. It wasn’t a suicide.”

“Why are you telling me this now?”

“I couldn’t find you earlier and your cell went to voice.”

“What? No, I mean, why today?”

“Tate just called me an hour ago. He’s going along with the OCI to investigate. That bastard Jimmy knew about this on Thursday, but wouldn’t tell me.”

“But Phil was talking about this on Thursday. I thought you knew.”

That’s when the wind went out of my sails.

“Uh, no. Nobody told me.”

“So that’s why you were so mopey over the weekend. Worried about nothing, as usual. I told you not to worry about it, didn’t I? Oh, look, they’ve got the stuffed peppers today. I hope they’re not the green ones.”

“No, I know you don’t like the green ones. I asked the guys to buy red or yellow peppers.”

The Rosencians were founded by a French priest, Martin de Bec, in 1789, just before the French revolution. The order of missionary priests was named for Saint Elizabeth Rose, a Twelfth Century French nun and hermit. With the antipathy toward clergy that the revolution spawned in France, Father de Bec took his fledgling community to Montreal, in Canada. As a result, the order’s earliest mission work was among the native tribes around the Great Lakes, then in western Canada and what became the Pacific Northwest in the United States.

The Rosencian seminary at Leaufroide, other than a few sheds and a sizeable garage-cum-workshop concealed amidst the trees, consisted primarily of four large, square buildings linked by enclosed walkways at the second level. These buildings were constructed using a special brushed steel in their exposed structural elements. That steel was allowed to rust, and this oxidized layer then served to protect the beams and posts from further weathering. The resulting dark reddish-brown finish blended well with the fir and pine trees around it.

The Rosencians had named three of the buildings for French saints, and one was named for Mary, the mother of Jesus ... The three-story building, which had housed both the seminary’s large chapel and its dining facilities, was named Saint Louis Hall, for the celebrated and Church-canonized Louis IX, who had ruled France for more than forty years in the Thirteenth Century.

Both exposed faces of the cornerstone in each building identified the saint to whom that building was dedicated. Coldwater County, in the interest of First Amendment secularization, had renamed each building in honor of Arabic numerals, rather than French saints, one through four, specifically. They placed brushed steel placards, made of the same rusting steel as the structural elements, on each cornerstone, displaying the numeral so honored -- but only on the side facing the parking lot. The other engraved steel face, displaying the saint’s name, was left exposed for those interested in the buildings’ history.

The de-consecrated chapel space on the third floor of Building Two, a.k.a. St. Louis Hall, had been divided in two with movable panels. Either room could serve as commission chambers, courtroom, or general meeting room, or they could be combined for larger group purposes.

Three floors below, on the ground floor, was the space that had been used as the seminary’s kitchen, with the dining hall on the floor above. Food was moved between them in large, insulated carts on a freight elevator. Coldwater County did not provide food service, so the dining hall was converted to office cubicles and the empty kitchen space was used by the county maintenance department for temporary storage.

As part of its effort to teach both home skills and job skills to the clients enrolled in the Community Maintenance Project, we had run a training kitchen, three mornings a week, in the basement community room of the Presbyterian church. One rehab specialist and three or four clients would prepare meals and bake cookies or cakes. Most of it was consumed by the participants, but occasionally some cookies or brownies would find their way back to the Center.

One afternoon, about a year after I’d started in my job, I got a call from the state vocational rehabilitation program supervisor at the State Health and Welfare office in town. She had received a notice that morning that described a particular funded project that had been shut down due to fraud.

The decision to pull the plug, while the project was still in its development stage, meant that there was a significant pot of unassigned money in the state voc-rehab (vocational rehabilitation) coffers. With the end of the fiscal year only two weeks off, there was no way the state program, itself, could absorb the money. Instead, the state office in the capital asked all their county supervisors to contact local rehab agencies to see if anyone had a project on the back burner or one they had in mind that could be worked into a proposal in a hurry

Coldwater County had been allocated a potential twenty-five thousand dollars.

Betsy Hangerford, the state’s voc-rehab supervisor in Coldwater County, knew that Developing Abilities, the county’s contract service agency for the developmentally disabled, had a proposal ready for seven thousand dollars for woodworking equipment for their furniture shop. That left eighteen thousand that would be lost, back to the feds for more bank bailouts, if we couldn’t find a better use for it.

As it happened, I had a couple cookies on a napkin, setting on my desk, which had been brought in by Charlotte Henderson, our rehab specialist in the training kitchen. That young woman was, at the moment, sitting across from me in one of the side chairs in front of my desk.

As I was looking at her, an idea began to form. I said into the phone. “Betsy, I think I have something, but I need to check with the staff. Can I call you back in fifteen minutes?”

Charlotte got up, as if to leave, and I pointed at her and then at the chair. She sat down, again.

“Sure,” I heard on the phone. “I’m not sure who else to call, anyway. I’ll just say, use it or lose it.”

“Don’t shop it anywhere else. I’ll call you back in a few, Betsy. Thanks for the opportunity.”

After I hung up, I looked at Charlotte.

“That was Betsy, down at the voc-rehab office. They’ve got eighteen thousand dollars they need to unload before the end of the month, else it goes back to DC for those jerks to squander.”

“And...?

“I’ve had a half-baked idea, if you’ll excuse the pun, in the back of my head ever since I first came down to the training kitchen at the church.”

“Like what?”

“Well, there were a couple things that bothered me about the way we had things set up.”

Her brow wrinkled.

“No, no, not you. You’re great with the folks, we’re lucky to have you. No, this is more general.

“First, that kitchen is pretty isolated. Except for the church sacristan, hardly anybody goes down there during the week. I noticed that, when I walked in, everyone seemed to get anxious and freeze up. If we’re looking to approximate employment in a commercial kitchen, there needs to be more social interaction of a varied nature.

“The other thing was that, I don’t know, the, uh, the ... the learning opportunities seem limited. What I mean is, in what they can cook. Now, maybe that’s appropriate, if we’re mostly training people for their own domestic cooking needs. But it bothers me all the same.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticizing you or what you’re doing. For what we have, I think you’re making the most of it. I just think they failed to account for some of the limits when they set it up down there at the church.”

She looked downcast. “I don’t know, Gary. That’s mostly all on me. Jimmy didn’t provide much guidance, and since we already had the cleaning contract with the church, I just went with it.”

“Yeah, that makes sense. As I’m thinking about it, where else could you have gone? There may not have been much choice. But ... we might have one now.”

She looked a little worried. “Like, what?”

“Don’t worry, if you don’t think it’ll work, it goes right in the trash. But I think you might have some fun.” I paused, as I gave a quick mental glance at my own baking ambitions. “Maybe I could have some fun, too.

“Here’s what I’m thinkin’: We’ll re-equip the kitchen over in Building Two. Have you been in there?” She shook he head. “Well, we can go look at it in a minute.

“Anyway, buy new equipment, oh, not like it was set up for, but smaller models of commercial equipment, stove, ovens, a floor mixer, dishwasher, like that. May have to buy used equipment to stretch the dollars. Then take the extra kitchen space, and the area where they parked and maneuvered the carts, and turn it into a small café, maybe with a counter for half a dozen stools, five or six tables. Serve a limited breakfast and lunch menu, and sell baked goods.”

“A proofer,” she said. “I want a proofer.”

“What’s a proofer?”

“It’s a cabinet with shelves in which you put yeast dough to rise. They usually have a little heating element that can hold a pot for water, to keep it warm and moist so the dough rises faster.”

“Okay, a proofer goes to the top of the list.”

“Uh, a large commercial refrigerator and a freezer. That’s going to be expensive.”

“Like I said, second hand. I know there’re shops like that. I was in one, once, back East. And there’s always eBay.”

She was sitting there, now, gripping the chair arms, like she was holding herself down.

I said, “Yeah, it probably wouldn’t work. Well, thanks for bringin’ the cookies.”

“What?!” she shrieked. “I thought that --”

“Just kidding, just kidding. Should I call Betsy back?”

“Well, duh.”

“If we take the money, we’ll have to find a way to make it work. Else they’ll want their money back and won’t be interested in a used proofer, instead.”

“Call her back. I’ll make it work if it kills you.”

And so, the St. Louis Bakery & Deli was born.

After lunch, I stayed in the bakery, helped the clients clean up and close the place down for the day.

Charlotte had left eighteenth months before, to accompany her new husband to a job in Hawaii. I tried to convince her that all they ate over there was Spam morning noon and night, but she decided to see for herself. A month after she left she sent me a Hawaiian Spam cookbook. We picked out a few recipes for the bakery to serve, and named each dish after Charlotte.

To replace her, we hired a lady who was a whiz-bang baker and cook. Knew all the professional tricks. Great cake decorator. But she didn’t get along well with the clients, couldn’t quite glom on to the idea that they could not help their quirky behavior. She lasted about six months.

Then one of our other rehab specialists moved into the job. He always got on great with the clients, had mostly been working with the cleaning crews. Nice guy, I really liked him.

Unfortunately, he was a health nut. Running, bicycling, kayaking, and, worst of all, eating healthy. The menu and bakery products began to reflect his, admittedly legitimate, beliefs. Oat bran muffins replaced the pecan sticky buns. Charlotte’s name disappeared from the menu. The word “Lite” began to make an appearance instead.

If I wanted to eat healthy, I could just graze on my front lawn. When I sat down for a meal or a treat, though, I didn’t want to feel like I needed a doctor’s prescription for it.

But he was really good with the clients and, though they didn’t like the food either, and even though business began to fall off, I could see some real progress being made with the clients, especially in social interactions.

For better or worse, after eight months in the position, he decided to go back to school to get a master’s degree, so we were once again without a bakery rehab specialist.

The clients had left for the day and I was sitting at the counter, making up a shopping list for the next day. A couple of the Maintenance Program clients had really been making progress. The new location afforded more opportunities than we’d realized when we wrote it up. There was money handling and change making, for instance, stock rotation and safe storage, hygiene standards, and state inspections; even shopping from a list, looking for specific items and within price limits.

People with severe mental illnesses weren’t dumb. It was simply that thinking clearly was one of the brain functions that was significantly impaired in the most severe illnesses. Trying to operate under the weight of a debilitating mental illness was like looking at an image through an unfocused camera, like trying to determine the lyrics in a mumbled song from a badly tuned radio station. It was often difficult for people to decide which button hole the button went in, let alone how to fill out an application for housing assistance. Making decisions, even the simplest, could become a lost skill.

And, while the medications made the voices go away and the un-nameable dangers fade, they sometimes contributed to the burdens of just trying to think clearly.

One of the things I’d wanted to see implemented in the bakery was the development of more routines. The techs who’d run the program had a tendency to make menu and baked goods decisions on a day-to-day basis. This meant that those decisions were more complex than Project clients were able to manage day in and day out. It also made it difficult for the clients to establish any sort of routines in their daily work, because each day brought a new combination of tasks.

For some reason I never quite figured out, I was unable to convince those rehab specialists to develop a four-week, rotating menu, sixteen daily lists of four or five baked goods, one or two breakfast dishes, and one or two lunch dishes. We didn’t pretend to be a full service restaurant, just a place to pick up a simple, tasty meal, a good cup of coffee, and an appetizing pastry or dessert. In the bakery display case would be some sweet rolls, some muffins, brownies, cake slices, maybe a pie or two, and some cookies to eat at your desk or take home to the kids. Simple, basic, items, but challenging for the clients, helping them reestablish the skills they’d lost.

While anyone was welcome, the bakery’s customers were almost exclusively drawn from among the county employees. Now and again, someone from an associated program or agency would stop by. Fact was, in our location at the far edge of town, up against the mountains, we were off the beaten path for anyone who wasn’t specifically coming up to the county offices.

Anyway, when the bakery tech position fell vacant for a third time, I decided to appoint myself as the interim bakery rehab tech. I simply moved my work shift to begin three hours earlier. Greta would hardly notice.

“Thought I’d find you here.”

I looked up from the shopping list to see Tate walking in the bakery door.

“Got any of that coffee left?”

“I just washed out the pot, but I’ll squeeze you some from the sponge.”

“Is that your secret?”

I went to get him a cup and brought the pot and some half-and-half back to the counter, where he’d already sat down. He tucked a dollar bill under the corner of the cash register.

“Reminds of a time in the wayback,” I said, “I was working for this little youth services agency in a small Colorado mountain town. We took a bunch of kids up in the mountains to go tubing, snow tubing, I mean. Had about fifteen kids with us, six-year-olds to early teens. I’d brought a big pot of chili for lunch, but more kids showed up than we’d counted on, so, as I was heating it up on the Coleman stove, I was throwing in some snow to thin it down a little, to make it stretch.

“One of the six year olds came up and asked what I was doing with the snow. I told him it was my secret ingredient. He was goggle-eyed.

“Couple weeks later, we had a holiday open house and one of the mothers approached me.

“‘Are you Mister Gary?’ she asked. When I admitted I was, she identified herself as the mother of that six-year-old kibitzer. She told me that she’d been making chili a few nights before and that her son was insistent that she add some snow if it was to taste any good. After he told her about my secret ingredient, she had him bring in a handful of snow for the pot. She just wanted me to know.”

“Ah, yes, secret ingredients. So, what was the deal with Jimmy? Was he keeping that autopsy secret?”

“Apparently only from me. Greta heard about on Thursday from Phil Amundsen. He and Jimmy are long-time pals.”

“Hold on. Are you saying Greta knew about it last week and never mentioned it to you?”

“Yeah, ‘fraid so. When it comes to me, Greta still hasn’t quite figured out the niceties. What I think it is, is that she can’t deal with the notion that I might be worried about something real. Any weakness I have plays into her own insecurities. So she tends to downplay the stuff that worries me so she can feel more secure.”

“Well, that’s logical, but it doesn’t make any sense.”

“Welcome to the world of abnormal psychology. Actually, it’s not really all that abnormal. People believe what they need to believe. Disabusing folks of their skewed beliefs can be like prying a rescue ring out of the hands of a drowning man. People cling to them because they truly believe, even if not consciously, that their lives, or at least their sanity, depends on them.

“Still, it hurt to know that Greta had that information while I was stuck in my shit for three more days.”

“I imagine.”

“Did the investigation turn up anything?”

“A little

“There were a couple mushroom buyers that were up there by the store. They were there the prior Monday, too, and remembered Caldwell talking to some mushroom hunters, but didn’t see where he got off to. They had the names of a couple of the hunters that were around, but some of those people wander all over the mountains, from the coast to the Rockies, depending on the time of the season. Things around here are just starting to wind down.”

The beeping of his phone interrupted us. We’d been around each other enough that he didn’t need to excuse himself to answer it. He pulled it from a pants pocket.

“Hey, Wanda,” he said into the phone. I could hear the tones but not the words of his caller, the receptionist-cum-dispatcher at the sheriff’s office. Tate and the deputies carried older model flip phones because they stood up better to the wear and tear. They had internet connections on the screens in the patrol cars.

“Just now?” He began to frown.

“Where’s Spud?” Billy “Spud” Martin was a deputy and a potato farmer from the south end of the valley.

“No, let him eat in peace. I can get there faster on the interstate anyway. Glenna’s not been feeling well, so...” Glenna was Spud Martin’s wife.

“Yeah. I’m up at the Saint Louis, leavin’ now. I’ll run up there code two. Tell me the guy’s name again.” He pulled a note pad from his shirt pocket, then a pen. He tucked the phone between his head and shoulder and started writing, then paused.

“There a ‘U’ after that ‘Q?’”

“He doesn’t know or you don’t know?” He put the pad and pen back in his pocket, took the phone in his hand.

“Nah, I’m kidding.”

“Okay, I’ll call in when I get up there.”

He put the phone back in his jeans pocket. Tate and the patrol deputies usually wore their tan uniform shirts with blue jeans, rather than the tan uniform trousers which, because of the black stripe down each leg, had to be dry-cleaned. The tan trousers tended to show dirt more than the jeans, too. The official uniform cover was an unadorned, black, broad-brimmed Stetson, but they usually wore black baseball caps with an embroidered sheriff’s department caption and five-point star on the front.

“Got ‘a go,” he told me. “Guy came into the Junction, says he found a dead body. When it rains, it pours. Talk to you later.”

“Be safe.”

The TV news that night, on Channel Two out of Kingston, reported that the body of a man, identified as Quang Viet Nguyen, of Portland, Oregon, had been discovered in the Blackstone Mountains, south of Coldwater Junction. There was some shaky amateur video showing a wooded setting and a covered body, on a wheeled stretcher, being loaded into a mortuary-type SUV. In the background, but barely recognizable, Tate and Spud were visible, notebooks in hand, talking to some people in a group of maybe half a dozen. Yellow crime scene tape could be seen, further back. The report went on to say that the cause of death was unknown and that the body was taken to the state morgue in Kingston for examination.

As a practical matter, county sheriffs and their deputies, especially in the more rural counties, like Coldwater, acted primarily in three roles:

1. Rural patrolman and first responder;

2. Security and enforcement arm of the county’s criminal and civil courts;

3. County jailer.

A few sheriffs, in heavily populated unincorporated areas, could afford a detective bureau. However, the state constitution structured the sheriff’s basic responsibilities more to court requirements, such as bailiff duties, service of legal papers, and managing prisoners, rather than criminal law enforcement, per se.

On the state level, the Department of Public Safety, among several other services, such as statewide Hazardous Materials (HazMat) response, had responsibility for two major law enforcement functions:

1. State Highway Patrol (SHP), essentially concerned with traffic safety and enforcement on state highways and major public roads outside of the incorporated limits of cities and towns;

2. Office of Criminal Investigations (OCI), what amounted to the detective squad for the state’s extensive rural areas.

The division of labor between sheriffs and OCI worked fairly well, with the exception of a cantankerous sheriff here or there. The generally good relationships were likely due to the OCI’s chief, Commander Raymond Huckabee, a former county sheriff, himself. He made it policy that sheriffs, at their own preference, were to be included in investigations at every opportunity, that they be kept fully and promptly informed of all developments, and their advice and concerns respected.

It was a smart move, and Huckabee, as a former county cop, knew it. Especially in rural areas, sheriffs and their deputies traditionally held a lot of information in their heads about many of the residents of the county. Rural areas, just like small towns, had few secrets. Sheriffs, along with knowledgeable deputies, could save the OCI detectives a lot of shoe leather and provide valuable insights for potential leads.

Then there were a few sheriffs, like Tate Plummer, who went out of their way to make the OCI agents’ job easier. They’d offer to cover some of the more tedious duties, or bring witnesses or others to a central location for questioning, if that suited the OCI detectives’ purposes. Tate reasoned that there weren’t that many major crimes that required OCI involvement in the county, so the extra effort was a negligible uptick in duties, when viewed from an annual perspective. But it paid dividends with the OCI, whose investigators had long memories of both snubs and willing assistance.

Tate called me to say that he and John Durkee would remain overnight at the site where the body was discovered. He had absolutely no reason to call me with that information. It was just his way of hinting that Louise might appreciate some company.

As I found out later, Tate had seen a bullet wound in Nguyen Quang Viet’s upper chest. He’d also taken note of the drag marks that followed the man’s shoe heels as his body was moved away from the unpaved parking area. He’d used nearly a thousand feet of crime scene tape enclosing the area between the parking area and the copse of tamarack where the body had been dragged. It was a hiker’s curious dog that had alerted to the corpse, hidden between two fallen trees.

Tate and Durkee took turns sleeping and patrolling the perimeter of the site, hoping to preserve whatever evidence might be there for the OCI crime scene technicians he expected in the morning.

Meanwhile, Greta and I invited Louise for supper, but she turned the tables and insisted we come out there. We quickly agreed. No arm twisting was necessary. While I was a good cook -- Greta not so much -- Louise was outstanding. Just saying so would make me hungry. My cooking, on a really good day, might be fit for a lesser king of a backwater, third-world kingdom. Louise, on the other hand, could, after weeding four acres of garden and mowing and trimming a quarter acre of lawn, stumble into the kitchen and, in forty minutes, turn leftovers into a feast worthy of the gods.

I think that, deep in our lizard brains, Greta and I knew that if we invited Louise to supper, we’d end up eating in her kitchen. It was troubling, but I’d learned to live with my duplicity.

Tuesday, June 11

Early the next morning, 05:00-in-the-early a.m., I was in the bakery, dumping flour, yeast, salt, and sugar into the floor mixer. It was an old, pale green, Hobart twenty-quart that we found at a defunct hippy commune up in the mountains. Moving that monster out of there had left me with a twisted back that put me out of commission for three days. But the price was right. Only four hundred dollars, and it had been kept in great condition.

Why was I there so early? Why not one of the Maintenance Project clients? Because of the illness and the meds that treated it.

Even if they could wake up this early, it would be hours before they were hitting on all cylinders. The only alternative would be if one of them decided to stay up nights and sleep days. That was a bad idea, when the therapy called for normalizing routines and socialization opportunities. Encouraging a marginally psychotic individual to be awake and alone every night was a recipe for disaster.

I had both the proofer and the oven pre-heating. While the bread and roll dough proofed, I’d make the muffins, a popular breakfast item. Then I’d prep a dish I wanted to test as a hot breakfast entree: fried cornmeal mush with bacon crumbles. I liked to do something different now and again just to get people talking about the bakery. There were a few employees who wouldn’t come in because they were afraid of what the mentally ill might do, like mix sand into the cookie dough or clean the tables with spit. It was a common prejudice resulting from the general misperception of mental and emotional illness.

The posted hot breakfast item for today was scrambled eggs with bacon crumbles, one of my secret weapons. I’d still make that, but I’d include a small sample of the fried mush as a side, topped with some real maple syrup. I was looking forward to the reactions.

Denny Kelly, a twenty-nine year old, wispy-bearded, skinny guy from eastern Washington State, was the client on the so-called early shift today. He’d get here by seven thirty to serve the early-bird customers who came in prior to the Center’s 08:00 business opening. Since he’d been working in the bakery, his social skills had increased markedly. While still a little iffy in estimating appropriate conversation, he enjoyed talking with the customers while filling orders and handling the cash register.