CHAPTER 3

MONDAY MORNING just after eight-thirty Rosemary pulled her back door shut and strode purposefully to the shed, determined to ignore the unholy racket behind her. It wouldn’t hurt that dog to spend a few hours alone in the house. And it wasn’t as if the noise would disturb anyone; the Runyons, her nearest neighbors, were nearly a quarter-mile up the road.

She opened the shed door, got into her truck, and backed it out. Besides, he could protect the property in her absence; no intruder in his right mind would risk contact with a creature making that… pitiful, broken-hearted lament. It was breaking her heart, anyway, she acknowledged as she set the brake, climbed out, and hurried back to the house.

Her truck was a three-year-old Toyota half-ton that had been her husband’s. It had four-wheel drive, bucket front seats, a smallish back seat, a mighty music system, a gun rack. It had, at the moment, no easy way to restrain a dog in the rear, the bed. She thought Mike Morgan would not be happy to see her friend riding loose back there, a circumstance that always gave Rosemary a moment’s panic when she passed an example on the road.

So that left the back seat, currently clean and unscarred. She sighed, opened the passenger-side door, and slid that seat forward, and a grinning Tank promptly leapt in and settled himself. “you’d better like it here, buster,” she told him as she slid under the wheel and aimed the truck toward town. “Because this is where you’ll spend the next several hours. I’m going to be busy.”

The Weaverville Senior Center—called, to the amusement of many, “Enders Center” for the late Ralph J. Enders, the wealthy local man who had built and endowed it—was a single-story building with board-and-batten siding shaped in an L to frame a garden patio. The wooden benches and the low brick walls that made comfortable seats for old folks in warmer weather were empty on this chilly, rain-and-wind-scoured morning; but the dining room inside would be well-populated by 11:30.

Having decided to live in this community if not permanently, at least for the foreseeable future, Rosemary Mendes had recently cast a cautious eye around for some civic task she could perform that would be honestly useful without entailing much social overflow. It had not taken her long to discover her ideal slot: a once-a-week stint cooking midday dinner at the senior center. Most of the cooks were women of middle years who had formerly fed large families of their own, and the work was truly work, not leaving a lot of time for idle chatter.

Besides, Rosemary had been a hit-or-miss, hurry-up cook with her own family, often pressed by fatigue or lack of time into guilty offerings of macaroni-and-cheese from a package or take-out fried chicken. This experience, regularly turning good ingredients into well-planned meals, was satisfying. once a week, anyway.

And who knew? she thought, as she pulled her truck into the parking lot behind the building. A few years in the future she might herself be tottering in here to be fed. She parked, opened the windows a few inches each, and got out, saying, “Now you stay here and be good and watch the truck.”

Tank’s ears flattened in dismay, or more probably confusion. “Stay,” she said. She thought, as she closed the truck door, that he now looked merely resigned.

The building’s back door let directly into the kitchen. “Hey, Rosemary,” said Leona Barnes, as usual already aproned and working. “That was some storm yesterday. I’m glad to see you didn’t drown or blow away out there by yourself.”

“We—I—just hunkered down and waited it out,” Rosemary told her. “My house is like me, small but tough. But it’s nice to be out and about with people again.”

“God love you, Rosemary!” This from Marylin Cochran, the third member of the Monday crew, as she came in from the front of the building shedding her coat. “Praise the Lord, He brought us all through that awful storm.”

Rosemary would have credited her own survival to good sense and good planning along with a bit of luck; but maybe Marylin saw god as the source of those. “I guess it was meant that I get here and do good work,” she said. “Shall I start on that mountain of potatoes?”

ROSEMARY opened the door of the left-hand oven to inspect the chickens roasting there, nice and brown and not far from being done. There was another panful in the second oven, and the redolence of the carrots, celery, and parsley in their cavities mingled with the rich chicken aroma to perfume the spacious kitchen.

“Right on schedule,” she said to Leona, who was lifting the lid on a pot in which potatoes were just coming to a boil. Frozen peas would be cooked at the last minute, but… “Then there’s the gravy.”

Leona, who was sixty-something, looked fifty, and would probably live to be a hundred, gave a snort of disdain. In her youth, Leona had cooked for lumber camps. “No problem, take care of that soon as you pull out one of the roasting pans.”

“Oh good. And Marylin told me the pies have arrived, cherry and apple.” Marylin was setting up in the dining room. Rosemary looked at the clock, realized she’d been here for over two hours, and reached for the jacket she’d hung near the back door. “Excuse me for a minute, Leona. I need to check on something.”

“Something” was Tank, dozing happily enough there in her truck. Rosemary let him out, said, “Okay, time for a quick pee,” and in a flashback that had a touch of nostalgia heard herself saying those very words to her two young sons on breaks during long car trips. Tank’s response was the same as Ben’s and Paul’s: He spotted a likely bush, watered it well, and came trotting back with a satisfied grin. All that was missing, thought Rosemary, was the rasp of the zippers.

“You guys are all alike,” she told the dog as she thumped his ribs. “Good boy. Back in the truck now.”

“Fine-looking dog,” said Leona a few moments later; there was a window over the sink that faced the parking lot. “I heard you knew this Mike Morgan woman.”

“No, I didn’t.” Rosemary washed her hands at the sink and dried them on a paper towel. “I know Graham Campbell and he more or less parked her dog on me.”

“But you like him. The dog, I mean.”

“Well. yes, I guess I do.” Rosemary’s surprise at the rapport that had developed so quickly between herself and the big yellow dog was coupled with a fear that someone would detect this attachment and proclaim it improper or illegal or something. There was a lot of mean-spirited officiousness out there and you had to stay alert. “He’s…good company. And protection for a woman living alone.”

“Didn’t protect Miss Morgan much, looks like.”

“I don’t know what you could expect him to do against a near-sighted idiot with a deer gun!”

“Hey hey, pardon me! Last thing I’d ever do is bad-mouth some-body’s dog! Specially yours, Rosemary.” Tossing a faintly apologetic grin down at the much shorter Rosemary, Leona turned to the stove again, poked the simmering potatoes with a long fork, and turned the fire off under that pot and its duplicate on the adjacent burner. “Let ’em sit for another ten minutes, they’ll be just right. What strikes me as real funny is that nobody knew her, not one bit.”

“You mean Michelle Morgan?” Housebound from midday yesterday by the storm, Rosemary had found that any unguarded moment left her prey to speculation about the dead woman. What had brought her, alone, to a scenic but out-of-the-way place of interest mostly to amateur historians and people who liked to fish? Was she hiding from danger? Licking wounds from some earlier misfortune? Simply weary of humanity?

And, always, the split question: Was it decent to poke and pry at someone who had for whatever reason chosen to stay almost to-tally private? And wasn’t there someone, somewhere, who deserved to know about her death?

“’Course I do, who else?” said Leona, bringing Rosemary sharply back to the moment. “She bought groceries at ToPS, but she never stopped to chat or got so she called any of the checkers by name. Same at Rob’s gas. Way I hear it, she never had so much as a ‘How’re you doin’?’ for a soul.”

“Was she rude?” asked Rosemary.

“Well…not interested in anybody, I might call that rude. The big cutting board is in that bottom cupboard there,” she added, noting Rosemary’s so-far-fruitless search.

“Thank you.” Rosemary set the board on the counter, took a long slicing knife from the knife drawer, and tested its edge. “Do you know,” she said after a moment, “how long she’d lived here? Out there, I mean. I understand she had a place well north of here.”

“That Morgan girl? Be two years come January,” Marylin announced as she came in from the dining room. “She got the place, eighty acres off Forest Service Road Twenty-five, from that old hip-pie, Jared Something. He had it for years, raised dope I believe, but nobody ever did anything about it.”

Marylin was an inch or two taller than Rosemary and twice as wide, her round face framed in wiry hair of a lusterless black. “The building was just a shack, a’course. When she first turned up she had this little camper on the back of her truck and supposedly lived in that. Then after the old man died, she hired that Baz Petrov to help her rehab the house and build a fence and post the whole place against hunting, which really pissed my Joe off.”

And less than a year later Rosemary had followed much the same course with her own little house, although she’d lived in a rented place in town while the foundation was replaced and the basement finished. This similarity gave her another not entirely pleasant jolt of identification with a woman she’d never met. “I think the chickens are done,” she said, turning to the oven and pulling on padded mitts in preparation for handling the big roasting pan.

Marylin wasn’t finished with sputtering complaint. “I mean, it’s no wonder something happened to her. The woman turns up out of nowhere and goes to living out there in the woods with a bad-tempered old man who looked like he’d not had a bath in years.”

“We don’t know that she was living with him,” said Leona, restoring Rosemary’s faith in the big woman’s basic good nature.

“Uh-huh, right. And then he got sick and she took him to the VA hospital and pretty soon he died. And left the whole shebang to her.”

“Could they have been related?” asked Rosemary. If Jared was a veteran, there would be records at least on him.

Leona shook her head. “County services checked into that some time back, found out he had no relatives at all. But however that girl lived out there, she did get him his groceries and his medicine and more or less looked after him. Which nobody else was doing.”

“He’d never stand for having anybody around before she showed up,” snapped Marylin. She reached into her shirt pocket and extracted a cigarette. “Dining room’s all set; I’m going out for a smoke before we get ready to serve.”

As Marylin disappeared out the back door, Rosemary moved the plump browned birds to the cutting board and yielded the roasting pan to Leona. “Marylin has a good heart,” Leona said, tipping the pan up to spoon out some of the fat, “but her and her Methodist ladies tried for years to ‘do good’ to old Jared, and he wouldn’t have it. ’Course,” she went on, with a sideways look and a quick grin, “my Charlie thinks those Methodists just had their mouths set for the pile of money the old guy was rumored to have stashed away.”

“Once in a great while,” said Rosemary, “a solitary poor person turns out to be a wealthy miser and gets a lot of press. But mostly they’re just solitary and poor.”

“Maybe,” said Leona. “But I heard Mike Morgan paid cash for all that work she had done out there.”

“Then the stash, if there was one, is gone.”

 

1979

IT WAS briefly a tableau, everyone frozen: shaggy giant in boots and jeans on the ranch house porch; smaller, older man at the bottom of the wooden steps, his hands on the shoulders of a tow-headed, scabby-kneed girlchild with eyes green as glass.

“Daddy!” The little girl flew up the steps and flung herself at him, arms upstretched.

“Hey there, pistol!” Brian Conroy swept up his five-year-old daughter and set her astride his broad shoulders. “What devilment you been up to now?”

With a chortle of pure glee, Brianna Conroy dug both hands into her father’s thick hair and grinned widely, the innocence of pearly baby teeth a sharp contrast with the light in her eyes. “I’ve been working!”

The older man grimaced and shook his head. “Shit, B.D., she was down there talkin’ to that stud again, I thought she was gonna climb right into the corral with him.”

“I wasn’t going in. I was letting Thunder out, so he could get some exercise.”

“No, baby, that would be a real bad idea.” Conroy wrapped his hands around her ankles and moved down the steps.

“Honest to God, boss, she scared me so bad I couldn’t hardly spit. What’s the matter with that woman you hired, anyway?”

“She quit.”

“Well, I might just do the same, before the day comes I have to bring her up here in pieces or squashed flat.”

“Got that, baby? You gotta stop scaring us old guys to death. Or I might have to build a pen for you.” He lifted her free and set her on the ground. “You tell Jed you’re sorry.”

Brianna brushed her hair back, squared her shoulders, and held out her right hand, man-to-man fashion. “I’m sorry I scared you, Jed.”

He shrugged, flushed, and took her hand. “That’s okay. Just try not to do it no more?”

Watching, Conroy frowned. “Hey, Princess? Where’s your big brother?”

“Oh, he’s reading.”

“By God, I’ll ream his sorry useless ass and.… never mind. Get yourself washed up and Daddy’ll take you into town for lunch.”

Propelled by her father’s swat on her rump, Brianna ran inside, and Conroy turned to Jed with a half-rueful shake of his head. “One damned kid I can’t move with dynamite, and one I’d have to hog-tie to keep her out of trouble. Brianna starts school in six weeks, that’ll settle her down.”

“Boss, I surely wouldn’t bet the ranch on that,” said Jed.