Page 23 of Heart of a Hero

“It probably isn’t a surprise that he divorced about five years ago.” Forrest continued looking. “His ex-wife is Rachel Flowers and… she has a restraining order on him. But it looks like it expired.” He turned to Conrad, his skin paling.

“What is it?” Conrad asked.

“I need to check something else,” he said, minimizing the window and bringing up a new one.

“Why are you logging into the school system?” Conrad asked, but Forrest didn’t answer. He brought up his class roster and clicked on Bethany Flowers. “Is that who I think?”

Forrest nodded. “It seems he’s the father of one of my students.” He logged off and closed the window. “Oh God. Lester Drovers is the father of one of my other students. Apparently she is going by Flowers instead of Drovers, but her mother is Rachel Flowers, and there’s a note to contact her immediately if Bethany’s father tries to get in contact.” He sat back. “What I don’t know is what Lester did to warrant all of this protection.”

“Jesus. I wonder if they know any of this at work,” Conrad questioned. “I sure as hell hope so, but if they don’t….”

“It’s one hell of a hot potato,” Forrest said. “The last thing you want is to be the one to blow the whistle on something like this. It will only make you look bad and rather petty. Besides, it’s family stuff, and that’s the stickiest kind of thing. We have to be careful at the school. I mean, he is her father, and with an expired restraining order, there is little to stop him from seeing his daughter.” Forrest groaned. “But it also makes things stickier for us.”

“Yeah. Who could have imagined that Lester’s daughter would be in your class.” Conrad held his head in his hands. “Or that Lester’s daughter and mine would be friends. Lizzie sits near Bethany, and she talks about her.”

“Yeah. They play together a lot at recess,” Forrest confirmed and returned to the computer. He reopened the earlier window and went back to searching. “God.”

“Is there more?”

“No. I can’t get at the details, and we’d probably need to go to the courthouse to get them. But there’d be enough red tape and open records request forms to choke a horse. This is probably enough for now. I could check other counties to see if they have anything. I’d try Dauphin, but their records are a notorious mess. Still….” He checked and didn’t come up with anything.

“So nothing criminal, but plenty of dirt with his family.”

“Yeah,” Forrest said almost in a whisper. “I mean, I could probably come up with the story if I asked around at school. Everyone seems to know the dirt on everyone else, and especially the kids’ families.”

“Whatever you do, don’t get yourself in any sort of trouble. I’m not sure I want to use any of this anyway. I mean, families are always messed up, especially during a divorce. It’s possible she filed for the order as some sort of retaliation. Though that’s pretty extreme.”

“Yeah.” Forrest looked for a while longer and then sat back from the computer. “I don’t know if we’re going to find out anything else.”

“Okay. Then how about we have some fun.” Conrad rested his hands on Forrest’s shoulders. “I was thinking about what we were working on….”

“Yeah, me too, and I’m not sure I’m feeling it.”

Conrad laughed. “I was going to say the same thing. We can set it aside for now. Instead. I came up with something a little more… interesting. I don’t know about you, but I was always interested in Egypt. I got to go to one of the exhibits in DC with some of the stuff from Tut’s tomb. Anyway, they had the most interesting gods, so what do you think about making one? Like Sobek, the one with the body of a person and the head of a crocodile. We could make it life-size and really get the detail. I have pictures of the stone versions, but when they were new, they were painted. So we could do all the bright colors and tons of detail.”

“Okay. That sounds cool. Could we make his mouth open and close?”

“Sure. I have some servomotors that are a bit more heavy duty. They should be able to handle that.” He was getting really excited. “I got an email with an invitation to a show. There’s a Lego exposition coming to Philadelphia in June. I was invited to speak, and they asked for an original piece that hadn’t been shown anywhere.”

“And you want this to be it?”

“Yeah. If you want, we could go. But that also means that we need to make the model in sections that we can remove and take apart. I’ve done it before, but it can be tricky and requires that we have extra strength built in. What do you think?”

“Is it a competition?” Forrest asked.

“Of sorts, yes. There would be other builders there. The piece we bring would be judged alongside the one we make while we’re there, and then the attendees vote on a winner. What do you think?”

Forrest smiled and nodded. “The only thing is we’d also need to find a way to make this funny and build in a story.”

“Oh, I’ve got the perfect story.” He chuckled. “I was thinking cats going after his tail. Something ridiculously cute like that. Egyptians loved and revered cats, so that will work.”

“Okay. Are you planning to make him with his feet apart?”

“Yeah. But we’ll need some sort of scenery around him. Maybe Nile flowers of some type, and they could disguise a third support to make sure he’s stable. So what we need to do is start with the feet and legs before developing the hips. Once we have that, and it’s stable, we can build the torso and the rest of the figure. The body should be black with gold and bright-colored ornamentation. The crocodile head can be deep green. I think that will be incredibly dramatic.”

“Okay. I just have one more question, do you want him my size or your size?” Forrest asked. “Why I’m asking is because we can use one of us as the basic model for proportions.”

“Okay. He’s a god, so we use you,” Conrad said. “After all, you’re pretty godlike, if you ask me. So take off your shoes and we’ll model your feet.” Conrad got a tape measure and used it to get the size of Forrest’s feet and his legs, both length and circumference. He also had him stand the way he wanted the model to be positioned and measured the distance between his feet. Then he set up the table with base planes and marked out where the feet should go before adding sand-colored bricks under the area to raise it up.