CHAPTER 4

MIDMORNING Tuesday, after the mist had retreated to the mountaintops and yielded the foothills to the sun, Rosemary drove down Willow Lane to the state highway and headed north, to take care of some business that had recently become more important. The dog sat upright watching the landscape for a few minutes, then stretched out on the seat with a sigh. From her understanding of where the Morgan woman’s property was, Rosemary thought it likely he’d been along this road many times.

Might be interesting to go see her, Mike’s, house. Might also be illegal or at least unwelcome to the sheriff’s people. Might make Tank unhappy—or happy. Who knew?

She drove on for some miles, taking absent pleasure in what was, after all, her chosen landscape. Weary of the beautiful but gray and chilly north coast, not at all interested in returning to the San Joaquin Valley where she’d grown up, she found the quiet and relative solitude of Trinity County blissful. The slopes of cedar, Douglas fir, Ponderosa and Jeffrey pine, and the occasional ghostly-looking Digger pine gave way in lower spots and along watercourses to hardwoods; the surrounding jagged peaks of the Trinities had the granite character of the higher Sierra but caught more precipitation, supporting more rivers and creeks and vegetation. In spring there were wildflowers, dogwood and redbud blossoms, ceanothus in various shades of blue; now, in fall, the big-leaf maples and cottonwoods—and poison oak—made explosions of brilliant color in the mostly green landscape. Even the winter pleased her; at two thousand feet you got snowed on but rarely snowed in.

The boom of a big gun some distance away startled her; another buck biting the dust or one more hunter cursing his luck. Tank lifted his head at the sound, but put it back down without complaint.

“Hah,” she said. “Gray was afraid you’d be gun-shy, but what does he know?” She passed the hamlet of Trinity Center, drove across Swift Creek and past the road to the trailhead for Lake Elean-or: a nice hike for her and Tank, perhaps, after deer season? A nod to the big private campground called Wyntoon, and she drove on along the western edge of Trinity Lake to cross the bridge that spanned its feeder, the Trinity River, and the great piles of rocks that were the result of long-ago dredge mining. “Hey, Tank?” she said as she turned right onto the road leading around to the east side of the lake. “How ’bout some goat cheese?”

Rosemary had met Sabrina Petrov, potter and goat farmer, some months earlier at a show at the highlands Art Center, which occupied a 1890s farm house on Main Street in Weaverville’s Historic District and devoted its energy to presenting a wide array of local and regional arts and artists. Rosemary now drank her morning coffee from one of Sabrina’s coffee mugs and kept an elegant bowl on her coffee table. Sabrina’s husband, Basil called Baz, telecom-muted to a software company in the Silicon Valley, and worked local construction when jobs appeared and he felt like it; he’d been half of the two-man crew that put on Rosemary’s new roof. Baz and Sabrina, educated and hard-working, had moved to the outback to find a gentler life for themselves and a place where they could hand-raise and homeschool their two children.

Several miles down the narrow, winding road, Rosemary stopped at the familiar gate, got out and opened it, drove through and got out again to fasten it shut. Five or six goats lurked close, dreams of freedom and adventure lighting their fierce yellow eyes, but she’d been too quick for them. As she set off up the long drive-way, it occurred to her that in another few years Kim Runyon would dump dreadful Tyler, and eventually his no doubt equally awful sib-lings-to-come, on the public school system to make life miserable for teachers and pupils alike. Meanwhile, Baz and Sabrina’s civil, kind, bright Marcus and Thea were out here on the farm, sharing their virtues with no one but their parents and a few like-minded families. Something out of balance there.

The Petrovs’ parking shed contained only Sabrina’s ancient Volkswagen van, which meant that Baz was away somewhere with his truck. “Well, I should have called,” Rosemary muttered. But Baz had been avoiding her recently, not returning her calls, and she’d hoped to catch him unawares.

As Sabrina came out onto the porch to see who had driven up, Rosemary gave a mental shrug and decided to have a nice visit and leave a firm message for Baz. She parked her truck and looked thoughtfully at Tank, noting his obvious, quivering interest in a couple of nearby goats. ?Stay, good boy,? she said, and got out quickly, closing the door against his hopeful nose.

Sabrina hurried down the porch steps to open the gate in the fence that guarded the house and a large vegetable garden from goats. “Hi, Sabrina,” Rosemary said, and reached up to return the taller woman’s welcoming hug. “I stopped by to remind Baz he promised me a fence. And I hoped maybe you’d have time for a cup of tea.”

“Rosemary, I’m so glad to see you! Baz is at his office in town today, but I’m sure you’re on his schedule.” Sabrina glanced toward the parked truck and raised her eyebrows. “Oh! You’ve got Mike Morgan’s dog.”

Rosemary was delighted to have stumbled onto this connection; any opinion Sabrina offered about Mike Morgan would be honest as well as insightful. “Did you know her? I’m surprised gray didn’t bring Tank to you instead of me.” graham Campbell was vet to Sabrina’s goats, and it was here at the farm that Rosemary had first met him.

“Tank, is that his name? Come on in, I just took a pan of sticky buns out of the oven. She always left him in her truck when she came to visit,” added Sabrina as the pair of them headed for the house.

“Because of the goats, I guess.”

“Well, that’s what she said. But Labs are smart, and the goats would have made it clear very quickly that they wouldn’t put up with any foolishness.”

Rosemary followed Sabrina inside, into the big, cluttered front room where nine-year-old Thea sprawled on a sofa with a book, and Marcus, a lanky thirteen-year-old, sat before a computer desk staring glumly at a monitor where a cursor blinked in the middle of a page of scattered sentences. “Hi, kids,” she said, and got a cheerful “Hi, Rosemary,” from Thea, a grunt and a nod from Marcus.

“Excuse him,” said Sabrina, ushering Rosemary into the yeast-and-cinnamon air of the kitchen. “We’ve been reading Julius Caesar for the past two weeks, and he’s supposed to write an essay about politicians then and now.”

?This is dumb,? Marcus called after them. ?Math is my subject.”

“So is English lit, dear,” said his mother. And, to Rosemary, “This will take just a minute, the kettle’s already hot.” She gestured her visitor to a chair at the round pine table and began making the tea.

“So, about the dog?”

“Right, the dog.” Teapot set aside to steep, Sabrina pried six buns from their baking pan and put them on a plate. She set buns, two small plates, and a basket of paper napkins on the table. “It sounds silly, but it was obvious that he was very important to her and I think she was afraid that we, the kids particularly, would steal him away. Alienate his affections. She didn’t act that way with you?”

?I never met her,” said Rosemary. “You know Gray, he always thinks first and most about the animal he’s worrying over. Probably decided poor Tank would be easiest with another solitary woman.” Only temporarily, she nearly added, and bit that back; who knew?

Sabrina propped her Levi’s-clad backside against the butcher-block counter, her long, freckled face under its mop of carroty curls unusually somber. “Beyond the business with the dog, I found Mike Morgan a strange woman. Sad, sometimes. Well, of course we all are, sometimes, but she was, oh, needful of companionship but un-willing to risk herself.”

“Kim Runyon knew her, or knew who she was,” said Rosemary. “Kim told me about the shooting. Then she had a good time pointing out how much alike Mike and I were—women who came here alone to live more or less solitary lives in tiny old houses. Gray said she had an ordinary face and a hiker’s stride. It’s clear that she loved her dog and trained him well. And that’s all I know about her.” She broke off a bit of bun and put it into her mouth. “Oh, my. This is wonderful, Sabrina.”

“Comfort food to celebrate surviving the first fall storm,” said Sabrina. She brought mugs of tea to the table, then sat down and took a bun for herself. “Baz met her over a year ago, when she saw his card on the board at the supermarket and hired him to help her modernize the cabin she’d just acquired. Not much more than a shack, Baz said it was, out in the Shasta–Trinity off Forest Service Road Twenty-five.

“Baz didn’t like her much,” she added. “Not only was she almost as tall as he is and nearly as strong, I suspect she didn’t genuflect.”

Rosemary raised an inquiring eyebrow, and Sabrina grinned. “You know, that subtle but telling gesture of deference to male superiority.”

“Sabrina, do you genuflect?”

“Hey, it’s in our marriage contract!” Her grin widened, then faded. “I met her some months later. One of my ladies, Guinevere, is an escape artist, and one day Gwinny got out and took Pansy with her. Mike found them, knew Baz’s wife was the goat lady, and brought them back. After that, she took to dropping by maybe every three or four weeks. She’d stay an hour at most, have a cup of tea or maybe one glass of wine, some bread and cheese.”

“Did she ever talk about herself? Where she came from, what brought her here?”

Sabrina shook her head. “Never. And I’m a friendly, snoopy, unembarrassable person, so you can bet I pried. She’d talk about whatever she was reading—contemporary fiction and mysteries, mostly. She’d ask about gardening, what to plant when and how. Once she asked Marcus a computer question; she didn’t have power at her house, but she had an adaptor so she could run her laptop off her truck battery.

“And I think the last time I saw her was about six weeks ago.” Sabrina’s blue eyes got shiny, and she blotted them on her sweater sleeve. “Sorry. I wasn’t really fond of her; she was too prickly. But she was very, oh, individual. Tall and strong and willfully separate. She was living her own life and not bothering anybody and it’s rotten that death just fell on her.”

In Rosemary’s experience death certainly did do that, often to people you were fond of. She could think of no response but a platitude, so took another bite of bun instead. The sticky part was still soft, and thickly encrusted with pecans.

Sabrina drank deeply from her mug of tea, wiped her fingers on a napkin, and picked up the pencil and sketchpad that lay to one side on the table. She tore off the top sheet and began to draw. Stopped, looked at the result, began again.

“Here,” she said after a moment, and put the pad in front of Rosemary. “That’s Mike Morgan.”

Rosemary saw an angular, broad-shouldered figure caught in mid-stride: long legs ending in boots, arms swinging free, torso wrapped in a puffy vest, a single long braid flying out behind the narrow head. In a second sketch beside the first, a few lines suggested a face: high forehead, hair skinned back tight, straight brows and long eyes with a faint uptilt, hard clean-cut jawline, chin stuck right out there.

?That?s not a person who didn?t bother anybody,? said Rosemary. “More like, somebody who’d not hesitate to give the Pope the finger. old family saying,” she added.

“Really?” Sabrina pulled the pad around to look at what her pencil had unwittingly created.

“Oh, that’s Mike.” Thea had come silently into the room and now stood at her mother’s elbow. Her round face crinkled in sorrow, and Sabrina stroked her blond curls and put an arm around her.

“She was my friend,” Thea told Rosemary. “She said if she had a baby, she’d want it to be a nice little girl like me, not some big dumb boy like my brother.”

“Your brother is not dumb,” said Sabrina in mild tones.

“Big mean boy,” amended Thea.

“Thea…”

“Sometimes he is, Mom. Can I have a bun?” Without waiting for a reply, she took one from the plate. “And she said her brother was mean, too. She said he was the one who cut her finger off.”

While Thea took a very large bite from the bun, Rosemary and Sabrina exchanged glances. “Mike’s left hand was missing its little finger,” said Sabrina. “I always assumed it was a congenital defect; the other little finger was very crooked. Thea, I think she was teasing you.”

“Probably,” said Thea, with the world-weary look of someone who gets teased frequently. “She did say that, honest. But then another time she said it got hurt when she was rodeoing and caught it in a rope. So I don’t know which was true.”

“In the ranch country where I grew up,” said Rosemary, “some of the girls entered the rodeos—barrel races and even bronc riding. But my dad always said it was too dangerous and too dirty for his only daughter.”

Sabrina got up to put another bun on a plate. “Here, Thea, be a nice little girl and take this to your brother.” When she returned to the table, teapot in hand, Rosemary had pulled the sketchpad close and was gazing at it.

“More tea?”

“Uh, no, thanks. I have some errands, and Tank’s probably thinking he’s been abandoned again. Sabrina, may I have this?”

Sabrina looked at her a bit oddly, then shrugged. “Not my best work, but sure.” She tore the top page from the pad, rolled it lightly, and put a rubber band around it.

“Thanks,” said Rosemary, accepting the packet. “And could you remind Baz that I really need the fence to go with the posts he put in three months ago? My acre of property borders some land used as pasture and some that’s just open, and I have to be able to confine my new dog safely.”

“Oh, shoot, Rosemary. And you’ve already paid for it, I bet. I’m sorry, but we’re always in need of money, and he lines up several jobs and then he—”

“Spends what he’s been paid on one to finance the start of the next. That’s an old familiar sin, the private contractor’s greatest temptation.”

With a grimace, Sabrina ran her fingers through her hair. “I know, but it’s basically unethical and embarrasses me, particularly when my friends are involved. I think he had some kind of dispute, probably just this kind, with Mike Morgan, and she stopped coming to visit.”

“I promise I won’t stop coming, Sabrina. Just tell him I want to talk to him, please. And I’ll see you again soon.”