Читать книгу: «The Price Of Silence», страница 2

That evening when Ruth Ann arrived home, she went straight to the kitchen to mix herself a tall glass of bourbon and ice water. Maria Bird was dicing onions, and she looked up as her husband Thomas Bird entered by the back door carrying a Jack Daniels’ carton.

“What’s that?” Maria asked.

At the same time Thomas Bird asked, “Where do you want me to put this?”

“With the others,” Ruth Ann said, sitting down at the kitchen table. “Papers,” she said to Maria. “And don’t ask what kind because I don’t know. Louise insisted that I stop by her house and pick up that stuff. She’s fading away, Maria.” Thomas Bird walked past them with the box.

“I know,” Maria said. “And she’s ready. But you have no business running around all day in this heat, or you’ll be in the same shape she’s in.”

Maria was five feet two inches tall, stocky, with lustrous black hair done up in intricate braids laced with red ribbons. She had come to help out when Johnny was born, a teenage girl fresh out of high school. Leone had called her “the little Indian girl.” He had left them all when Johnny was two, as if he had fulfilled his duty here and it was time to move on. Maria had stayed. A few years later, Maria had brought Thomas Bird in to introduce him, almost as if asking permission to marry him. He was not much taller than she was, and powerfully built. Ruth Ann had no illusions about who ran her household—they did. She had told them fifteen years earlier that she had named them in her will. They would get the house, Johnny would get the press. She had few if any secrets from Maria, and Maria, no doubt, shared everything she knew with Thomas Bird.

Sipping her drink while Maria prepared dinner, Ruth Ann told her about Todd and Barney. “Shaggy chestnut hair, big eyes like milk chocolate, and a brain. She’ll come back on Sunday and start on Monday and Barney will see to things in Portland and come along in a couple of weeks. He’s like a curly-haired boy, maybe a little younger than she is, or at least he looks younger. She’s twenty-eight. They loved the house, but it needs to be cleaned.”

Maria nodded; she would see to it.

“I reassured them,” Ruth Ann continued, “that the Tildens will likely be away for years.” Their daughter had been widowed by an accident that had left her partially paralyzed, and there were three young children. She knew the Tildens were not going to return to Brindle until the youngsters were grown. Ruth Ann sighed. One after another of her generation, leaving one way or another. Louise, whom she had gone to see in the nursing home, was eighty-eight, on her way out. She took another sip of her drink.

“Anyway, Louise insisted that I go over to the house and pick up that box. Deborah was supposed to bring it around weeks ago, but she’s been too busy and kept forgetting. If I’m going to write the history of Brindle I need that material, Louise said. Strange to be so lucid, and she is, and so weak. She’s entirely bedridden now.”

Maria tightened her lips. It didn’t pay to dwell on the natural order of things, she sometimes said, and didn’t repeat it now, but Ruth Ann got the message and did not continue. She would write Louise’s obit that weekend, have it ready. She would kill Lou Shinizer before she let him touch it.

From the kitchen table she could see that the sun had cleared the mountains, and shadows were forming out on the patio. She picked up her drink and walked to the door. “Can I do anything in here?” she asked. Maria said no, the way she always did. Ruth Ann went out to the patio and sat down again. The air had cooled rapidly as the sun moved on its westward track.

Seeing her old friend that day, knowing her end was so near, had stirred up too many memories, she mused. She had suddenly remembered with startling clarity the last time she had seen her father alive, sixty years ago. Stricken with pneumonia, he had struggled for breath under the oxygen tent they used in those days, only a few years before the penicillin that would have saved him. He had said something about the paper, or papers, save the paper…something. Today Louise had said almost the same thing: she had saved the papers.

After her father’s funeral, Ruth Ann had gone back to Eugene, to the women’s dorm to pack up her belongings and go home again, to take charge of the press, to save the paper. She had worked with her father from the time she was a child and knew exactly what had to be done, while her mother was totally ignorant of every aspect of it.

For years after that, she had lived with her mother in their little house on Spruce Street, two blocks from the Bolton Building that her father had built to house the newspaper. And then Leone had entered her life. She smiled faintly. She had been thirty-eight, in love for the first time, captivated by a pretty face and a charming accent. Leone had done two good things: fathered a child, and built the house Ruth Ann lived in now. A good house, he had said, a Mediterranean house, stucco, with a red tile roof, and wide overhangs to keep out the summer sun, let in the winter light, spacious rooms, this semi-enclosed patio. She took a longer drink. Leone had believed she was wealthy, she had come to realize, and when he learned that she wasn’t, he had pouted like a child. Johnny had his beautiful eyes and some of the same gestures, which she didn’t understand. He had no memory of his father, how could he have learned those gestures? One of those riddles jealously guarded by the genes. She finished her drink.

She brought her thoughts back to the question of papers. After her mother died, Ruth Ann had gone to Spruce Street to pack up the house, and she had found half a dozen boxes of papers that she had never known existed. Now she wondered if her father had told both of them to save the paper, or papers, and if her mother had done so without ever mentioning it. Ruth Ann had moved the boxes to one of the empty rooms and they were still there.

Three

Wednesday night, Todd was dreaming. The presses were running, newspapers shooting out like disks from toy guns, flying out randomly, falling in heaps here, there, everywhere. When she tried to catch one, it eluded her, and she ran around a cavernous room pulling switches, jabbing buttons, trying to stop the press gone wild. An arctic wind stirred the papers, blew them around in a blizzard that blinded her, threatened to smother her.

Abruptly she woke up, shivering uncontrollably, struggling with the sheet and thin coverlet on her bed. The room was freezing. Groping for the light switch, she sat up amid the tangle of bedding. She had turned off the air conditioner earlier and opened a window; now she wrapped the coverlet around her shoulders and crossed the room to close the window. She didn’t even have a heavy robe, not in August, she thought in disgust. The air-conditioner control was set to Off; she turned it to Heat, but the cold was penetrating, unrelenting. She went to the bathroom and turned on the hot water in the tub. When she looked in the mirror, she saw that her lips were pale, not quite blue, but close, and she couldn’t stop shaking. In the tub of hot water, gradually warming up, she decided she had to get out of this creepy hotel, go to the house that was to be her home for the next two years.

At first, she had been charmed by the hotel lobby, its vaulted ceiling, the intricate pattern of inlaid wood flooring, the marble counter at the registration desk, all turn-of-the-century elegance. But the suite she was in was not charming. Two small rooms that had seemed quaint, cozy and inviting had changed, become oppressive. Now this. Air-conditioning gone crazy, and no one to call at two-thirty in the morning.

She closed her eyes as the steam rose from the hot water. She wanted to be home with Barney, feel his warmth next to her, feel his arm over her, his legs pressing against hers. Realizing how close she was to tears, she shook her head angrily. Not her style. She missed him, and she was tired. That was all it amounted to, fatigue and loneliness.

Ruth Ann shivered and pulled the cover up higher, vaguely aware of Maria, who had entered her bedroom. Maria put an electric blanket over her and plugged it in, then sat in a nearby chair, wrapped in her own woolen blanket. Ruth Ann slid back into a dream-laden sleep. She was examining the newspaper with a screaming banner headline: Murder. She looked at the text, but it dissolved into a blank white space before she could focus on it. She turned the page; again the text melted into whiteness when she tried to read it. She could see pages of dense, crisp black text on white, but wherever she paused and tried to read, the text vanished. “I can’t see it, Dad,” she said plaintively.

“I didn’t have time to write it,” he said from somewhere behind her. When she turned to look at him, he vanished just as the print had done.

“Hush, Ruth Ann. Hush,” Maria whispered. “Go back to sleep now.”

Gradually the warmth of the blanket stilled her shaking, and she slipped deeper into sleep. When she woke up again, the electric blanket was gone and her room was pleasantly warm. She tried without success to recall her dreams, gave it up, and reflected instead on the miracle Todd had wrought. This week’s newspaper was fine, perfect, the way it should be, and she had told Todd to take the day off, to relax and get some rest, exactly what she herself intended to do. She felt as if she had run a marathon, which in a sense was what they had done over the past three days.

Todd checked out that morning, loaded her bags into the Acura, and then went to the newspaper to look over the computer programs. Once there, she stopped by Johnny’s office. His door was open and she tapped lightly and entered. He beamed at her.

“I thought you were taking the day off,” he said. “You deserve it.”

“I am. I just wanted to get an idea of what all was installed on the computer. It’s a real mess, jumbled with stuff you don’t need, and missing a few things that you do. You really should have a firewall and a better utilities program. I’m going to have to uninstall just about everything down to the operating system and then reinstall things. It would be best if I do that after office hours. If you have no objection I’ll network my laptop into the system, back up everything onto it, and do a lot of the work at home and try not to disrupt things here while I’m at it.”

He spread his hands. “Say no more. Todd, whatever it needs, do it. Blanket permission, no questions asked. Good enough?” He grinned at her. “Just don’t tell me about it.”

She laughed and turned away from the door, paused and said, “Good enough. Is this place locked up tight after hours?”

“I’ll get another key and drop it off at the hotel for you.”

She shook her head. “I’m moving into the Tilden house today. I have to see to the electricity and phone, transfer them to our name, things like that. I’ll drop by here later and pick up the key.”

Mildred, the round-faced woman who handled the classifieds, smiled broadly at Todd when she left Johnny’s doorway. “You’ve put him in the best mood he’s had in months,” Mildred said in a low voice. “Good job.”

Toni, the accountant, nodded and mouthed the same words: “Good job.”

Todd felt buoyed when she left the building and looked around. “Good job,” she repeated to herself, pleased with the praise, with her acceptance. “It really is going to work,” she said under her breath.

She took her time getting to her new home, winding in and out of the streets slowly. Back here, away from the highway, it was a pretty little town, with neat houses and yards, not a lot of greenery, but not desert, either. That changed as she drove north on one of the streets, where the houses ended and the desert took over. It was about another half mile to North Crest Loop; although the street had been finished all the way to it, building had stopped, and the continuation of the street was in poor repair. Scattered pine trees had achieved mature growth, and there was a lot of sage and rank grasses. It was like that on Juniper, her street, and apparently that way on all of them, as if the planners had anticipated development to continue north. Instead, it had moved south, on the other side of Brindle Creek, and east on the other side of the highway, leaving this end of town barren. There was a park along the creek front, a block wide, several blocks long with shade trees, picnic tables, a playground. Children were playing there now, a few women were on benches chatting.

Brindle, she had learned, had been named after the small stream that bisected the town. Joe Warden had ridden this far and stopped when his horse, a brindled mare, went lame. The stream, no more than ten feet across and shallow, flashed silver against black and brown lava, colored like his horse. He called it Brindle Creek, and years later, when the town was incorporated, the name stuck. There was a footbridge at the park, and she had heard there was another one up farther. She had not seen it yet.

It didn’t take long to explore the town. She headed for her house, repeated it under her breath, “Her house.” She loved it—the juniper paneling, polished plank floors, bay windows, fireplaces in two rooms…. But she had to buy opaque shades for the bedroom—Barney woke up if any light hit his eyes—and dishes, a few at least until their stuff was delivered, sheets to last until they got their own, a towel or two…. Wandering through the house, she made a list, and then headed for Bend, a discount store, the utility company, telephone company….

It was nearly five when she returned to the office, and very hot again. She was not sweating, to her surprise, and realized that the air was so arid that perspiration must evaporate as fast as it formed. She felt parched.

Johnny was chatting with another man in the outer office when she entered. “Todd,” Johnny said, smiling, “I was beginning to think you’d gotten lost in the great metropolis of Bend. Come meet our doctor. Sam Rawleigh, everyone’s doctor in these parts. Todd Fielding.”

Dr. Rawleigh was tall and very handsome, like a television personality or a movie actor. Dark wavy hair, touched with grey at the temples, regular features, even a square chin with a slight cleft. As a young man he must have been a knockout, she thought, shaking hands. Now, fifty-something, he was still one of the handsomest men she had ever met. His eyes were dark brown, eyebrows with enough of an arch to suggest flirtatiousness, and a tan that was so smooth and even it looked like a salon tan.

“Todd, I’ve been listening to your praises,” he said. “But no one mentioned that you are also beautiful. It’s a pleasure.”

She felt the heat rise on her cheeks. God, she thought, he must have to fight off his female patients with a baseball bat.

“We were on our way across the street for a drink,” Dr. Rawleigh said. “Join us.”

She started to shake her head, and he added, “What I prescribe for you is an iced double espresso. You look as if you’ve had quite a day in heat you haven’t yet become accustomed to.”

“Good heavens!” she said. “That sounds irresistible. Just like that, you talked me into it.”

“I’ll pick up that key for you,” Johnny said, and strolled back to his office.

They crossed the street and sat under an awning at Carl’s Café, where Todd could smell pine trees, desert and heat. She hadn’t realized heat had its own particular odor, but she was certain that was what she sniffed in the dry air. Both men ordered beer and she had her espresso, then sighed with contentment at her first sip. Just right.

“You didn’t like our hotel?” Dr. Rawleigh asked after taking a long drink.

“It isn’t that,” she said. “I want to get the house in order, get settled—but I have to admit that having the air conditioner go crazy in the middle of the night was not a real inducement to try another night there.”

“It wasn’t the air conditioner,” Johnny said. “We get a crazy inversion or something now and then and a blanket of cold air settles over the whole area, then dissipates after a time.”

“In August?”

“Any month. No one has really explained it, but it happens.”

“Have you felt the water in the creek?” Dr. Rawleigh asked. “It’s like ice water year round. Up at Warm Springs it comes out hot, here it’s ice water. The inversion is sort of like that—except that it’s air, not water. The volcanoes around here are strange, not like other mountains. That frigid air mass has been happening ever since I’ve been around, off and on, unpredictable. I was here for months before I experienced one. You’re here less than a week and there it is. Go figure.”

“Surely a meteorologist can explain it,” Todd said. “I never felt cold air like that before in my life.”

“We’ve had a couple come in,” Johnny said, “and nothing happens. They leave again thinking we’re all balmy. We’re okay. This land is what’s crazy.”

He laughed. “For a good look at our crazy land, some time after the weather cools a bit, you and your husband should take a day hike up to the creek head,” Dr. Rawleigh said. “Great view from up there. It’s a good hike, five or six miles up and back. Up Crest Loop to a narrow bridge, and take the left road, a dirt road. The Loop winds on around a while, past my place, and eventually back down to the highway, but the dirt road turns into a trail up a ways and eventually you’ll come to a big boulder, and gushing out from under it is where Brindle Creek begins. It isn’t a difficult hike, but watch out for rattlesnakes. They’re up there this time of year. Anyway, it’s dry as a bone above the boulder, nothing to indicate that it’s the source of pure ice water. You can fill your water bottles, perfectly safe up there. You don’t want to do that down farther, but it starts out absolutely pure. The creek comes tumbling down the terraces, through town, under the highway bridge, and on for another mile or two and then takes a dive. Gone.”

“What do you mean, gone? Gone where?”

“Underground. The Great Basin is jealous. No water that goes in ever gets out again. Just the way it is.”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Todd said. She finished her espresso and picked up her purse. “I have to be going. It’s nice meeting you, Dr. Rawleigh. Thanks for the prescription. It was exactly right.”

“Please,” he said. “Just Sam. The little kids call me Dr. Rawleigh because their moms make them, then it turns into Dr. Sam, and before you know it, just plain old Sam. We’re all on first names here, even us outsiders.”

“You’re an outsider?”

“Going on twenty-one years now. Came, married a local girl, stayed, but I’m an outsider. An observer. You get used to it.”

Although Johnny looked a little uncomfortable, he did not dispute the doctor’s words. He shrugged and waved to the waitress for the check, and Todd left them at the table, bemused. So far everyone had treated her exactly the way she would have expected, kindly, with friendliness, without a trace of suspicion or distrust.

That night she called Barney and told him about her day and he told her about his, then said huskily, “The movers will come on Tuesday, and the minute they’re out the door, so am I.”

Just as huskily she said, “Good. Then I will try to be patient and not run away with the handsome doctor.”

When she hung up, she closed her eyes tight and drew in a long breath. She had never been so lonesome in her life.

Four

“And on your left, is the one and only Coombs greenhouse where at this very moment an acre of tomatoes is getting sunburned, or sun dried, or something. The Coombs girls are both in their sixties.” Todd was the tour guide, pointing out the must-see sights to Barney as they strolled. They had been there a month, but this was the first weekend free of settling-in chores. “I have to take pictures at their mother’s funeral, at least at the cemetery, on Monday. Half the county will be there, according to Ruth Ann.” Sobering, she said. “Ruth Ann wrote a very touching obituary. She’s really a fine writer. Anyway, coming up on the right is Miss Lizzy’s gift shop, where you will find plates with the map of Oregon, Chief Joseph’s last stand, some of the loveliest carved or sculpted birds I’ve ever seen, a rendition of the Oregon Trail on bark—” She frowned at Barney, who had started to laugh.

“Sir, this is a serious business.”

“You’re babbling.”

“I know. You have to remember that as one of four children, and just a girl, no one ever paid any attention to anything I said, so I stopped saying much of anything until I found you—Oh, look. There’s Sam’s Explorer. He’s going into the rock shop. Come on, you can meet him. The owner is Jacko. No last name. Just Jacko.” She hurried him along.

During the past month, she had made it a point to enter every business establishment in town and introduce herself. Her cause, she had explained to Barney, was to be known so that if anything happened, someone would think to tell her. Also, she had said, Shinny, their star reporter, didn’t know the difference between a grocery list and a news story. So far the most compelling bit of news he had reported had been the town-council meeting; they were debating where on the highway to put a traffic light. North end of town, or at Crest Loop? The debate, she had added, had been raging for two years.

Jacko’s shop was a single room with aisles barely wide enough to maneuver in, crowded on both sides by bins of rocks, baskets of rocks, a long counter so cluttered with rocks there was never enough space to fill out a receipt, a showcase filled with cut and polished rocks, and another one with rocks that had been carved, inset into wooden frames, rested on black pedestals, or simply tumbled about. An agate-framed clock said nine fifteen, and always said nine fifteen, but its snowflake agate was beautiful. It was dark blue with white flecks that looked adrift throughout. In the rear of the shop was a workbench crowded with lapidary equipment.

When Todd and Barney entered the shop, Sam was leaning on the counter, where he and Jacko were examining something. Both men looked up.

“Hi,” Todd said. “This is Barney. My husband.” After the introductions, they all looked at a geode on the counter. The hollow rock was as big as a grapefruit, and had been cut into two pieces.

“I never saw one that big,” Todd said. “It’s awesome.” It was neatly halved, the cavity filled with glittering crystals of quartz streaked with pale blue. She looked at Jacko. “Is it for sale?”

“Ask him,” Jacko said, jerking his thumb at Sam. “He found it and sawed it open. He brings in stuff like that to rile me.” Jacko was short, no more than five feet five, and his head was totally bald, but he had a great beard with enough hair that if it had been amply divided between his pate and his chin there would have been hair left over.

Barney was examining the geode. “Wow, that is a beauty. How did you manage to saw it like that?”

Two big crystals had been split almost exactly in half, and the cut edges smoothed and polished to a mirror finish.

“Just luck,” Sam said. “No way of knowing what you’re going to find until you open one of them, and I happened to hit it right. I thought I’d have them made into bookends, juniper wood, curved like a wave breaking with these set in. If Thomas Bird will carve the stands, they’ll make a pretty pair.”

“A fantastic pair,” Barney said. “Where did you find it?”

Jacko snorted and Sam grinned, then said, “Does a fisherman tell where he caught the fifteen-pound trout? Out there.” He waved his hand generally toward the vast desert.

“You have equipment to cut rocks and polish them, all that?” Todd asked.

Jacko made his peculiar snort of laughter again. “He’s got stuff that makes mine look like a kid’s first tool kit.” He motioned to Todd to follow and started to move away, saying, “He had to build a special room to house his equipment. Look, I got some new crystals in last week.”

While she looked at the new crystals, Barney and Sam chatted about the desert and rock hounds. “It gets in the blood,” Sam said. “You always think that next time you’ll find something even better, or you find a streak and have to force yourself to leave it, hoping no one else will come along before you get back to it. Come up to the house sometime, let me show you my collection.”

Todd shook her head at Jacko. “I’m waiting for a clearance sale.” Turning to Sam she said, “We took that hike last weekend, up to the start of the creek. It’s beautiful up there. Thanks for telling me about it.” She glanced at her watch. “We should be going,” she said to Barney. They were on their way for a cookout with Jan and Seth MacMichaels.

Outside again, heading toward the manufactured houses where Jan and Seth lived, she said, “Chief Ollie Briscoe began calling Seth Sonny, and now almost everyone does, and he hates it. So don’t call him Sonny.”

“I wouldn’t have thought of it until you told me not to. Now, I don’t know. What if it pops out?”

“Ollie also said he’s a loaded gun looking for someone to shoot. So watch it. That’s all I can say.”

They both laughed. Jan worked at Safeway and Seth was fulfilling a two-year contract as a police officer in Brindle, his first job after finishing police academy. Eventually he wanted to work as a investigator for the state police, she told Barney, but he was too young and green, and with the budget cuts they had endured, the department wasn’t hiring anyway.

It was unfortunate, Todd thought a few minutes later, but Seth did look like someone who should be called Sonny. He was tall and broad, built like a football player, a high-school varsity player, with a lot of reddish-blond hair, a big open face, and candid blue eyes. He was sunburned, as if he never really tanned, but burned again and again. His nose was peeling. Jan was dimply and cute with masses of dark curly hair, heavy eye makeup, and a Barbie-doll figure.

They were seated under an awning at the rear of the house that was radiating heat, as was the concrete slab of a deck. “Bake in the summer, freeze in the winter,” Jan said. “I can’t tell you how jealous I was when I heard you got a real house. It wasn’t available when we were looking.” She took a long drink of beer from a can. Seth was grilling buffalo burgers. “When we get back out in the real world,” she said, “I intend to go back to school. I think it’s terrific that you’ve hung in there like you have.”

“To study what?” Barney asked.

“I don’t know. Something to do with people. No computers, and no numbers.”

Barney grinned and held up his beer can in a salute. “My sentiments exactly.”

“These are about ready,” Seth said. “Hon, you want to bring out that tray?”

Jan stood up and went inside, came back with a tray of salads from Safeway. “Chow,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind store salad. It’s too hot in there to cook. Thank God, it’s not as hot as last month, and by this time next month we’ll be freezing. That’s Brindle for you.”

After a bite or two of the buffalo burger, Todd said it was delicious. “Have you given up on beef?”

“Not if it’s local,” Seth said. He told them about a butcher shop out of Bend, local beef only. “If it comes from Grace Rawleigh’s ranch, you know it’s going to be great. Have you met her yet? She’s a direct descendant of the town’s founder, Joe Warden.”

They hadn’t. “You’re in for a treat,” Jan said with more than a touch of malice. “And now that her daughter Lisa’s in town for a visit, it’s like a two-scooper treat.”

Seth gave her a stern look and she grinned and shrugged. “Just repeating what I’ve heard. I haven’t met Lisa,” she said to Todd. “But from talk I hear at the store, she’s a bundle of fun. A ballbuster, if you get what I mean.”

Seth put his can down. “Jan, cut it out.”

“Okay. I’ll keep it clean. She and her ex are having a big fight over the spoils of a divorce, her third. From what I’ve heard, Lisa doesn’t feel like she’s met a man until she’s slept with him. And she’s a serial marrier who believes in marital freedom.” She rolled her eyes and grinned at Seth. “Clean enough?”

“Jesus,” he muttered. Before Jan could say more, he said, “Lisa lives down in L.A. She’s into movies, maybe produces or directs, something like that, not as an actress. She comes back every few years for a visit and sometimes, they tell me, there’s trouble while she’s here. And that’s all we know about her.” He gave Jan a warning look.

For a moment she met his look with an expression of defiance. Then she averted her gaze. “Plus she has mysterious plans for Brindle. She’s thirty-five. And that’s really all we know about her.”

But it wasn’t all, Todd thought. A new tension was in the air, the silence uncomfortable. “Are Sam and Grace still married?” she asked. “They don’t seem to live together.”

“They don’t,” Jan said promptly. “He lives in that big ugly stone house on Crest Loop, the one that looks like a gargoyle looming over the town. It’s Grace’s house but she hangs out at the ranch when she isn’t traveling. She’s gone a lot and hardly ever gets over here except to lay down the law about this or that. The hotel is hers, too. There’s a general manager or something who runs it. Mort Cline.”

“It seems to me that in such a small community, where everyone knows all about everyone else, there shouldn’t be any crime to speak of or any need to lay down the law,” Barney said.

Seth kept his gaze on a bun he was slathering with mustard as he said, “Just last week I had to break up a brawl. Three eight-year-olds in the park going at it. And yesterday I had to go tell an old man to stop burning trash outside. A real crime wave.” He put a burger on the bun and bit into it.