CHAPTER 5

ROSEMARY AWOKE Wednesday morning in a tangle of sweat-damp sheets, her heart still thudding and her mouth still curved in pleasure. But she didn’t reach out to the pillow beside her, knowing it would be cold and smooth, undented by any human head. Jack had been with her only in her dream.

She rolled onto her back and lay staring at the ceiling. years and years ago was the time in that dream, her hair a glowing auburn and her breasts firm. Jack had loved her breasts. And he’d had his full, shiny mop of black curls, no gray streaks or thinning spots. No worry lines between his eyes, no sad droop to his mouth.

She sighed and sat up, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. “He was a lovely man,” she said to Tank, who had, she suspected, been sitting beside the bed watching her for some time. “It wasn’t his fault he had such a strong sense of family and such crummy relatives.”

Her bedside clock said seven-thirty, which was about half an hour past the dog’s internal breakfast-timer. Now he gave a little bark that ended in a pitiful whine, nudged her knee with his hard head, and as a last resort picked up one of her slippers and moved just out of reach.

On her third request he brought the slipper back, and lay down to watch her step into it and its mate and pull on her robe; he trailed her into the hall and then waited for her outside the bathroom door, reminding her of his needs by uttering low groans. Rosemary took her time, determined to maintain her position as Alpha around here.

In the kitchen she put water on for coffee, poured herself a glass of grapefruit juice, and stood drinking it at the front door as Tank made his morning survey of their domain. When he came grinning back to her, tail waving and the hair on his neck and back flat and unruffled, she gave him his dish of kibble and felt her own shoulders, tightly held though she hadn’t realized it, relax. The evening before, traffic had seemed unusually heavy on her isolated little road; and each time Tank announced loudly that there was something out there, Rosemary was reminded of the woman whose sketched image now graced her refrigerator, the woman who had, like herself, come here to live alone.

Rosemary picked up a tennis ball from the basket beside the door and tossed it out. The poles were in and set for the fence that would enclose her acre lot; and Baz Petrov would by heaven turn up here today and get back to work or she would, as she’d told him by phone yesterday evening, do her best to make his life miserable. In fact, she’d probably enjoy doing that; she’d spent far too many years of her life being agreeable.

As she took the ball from the dog, an engine sounded on Willow Lane and then a newspaper sailed through the gate opening. Tank set off to retrieve it, while Rosemary reflected that the delivery person, who threw from his slowly moving vehicle, would probably not be able to make a toss that would clear a six-foot fence. With every solution a new problem.

In the kitchen again she nodded to Mike Morgan’s image, toasted a muffin, and wondered about her dream. Jack had been dead a month short of two years, and he had not appeared in her infrequent dreams for…a long time. Had he turned up to remind her how much they’d enjoyed lovemaking, perhaps to suggest that she find a new source?

“Nonsense,” she said aloud, spreading butter lavishly over the muffin half. At twenty, she’d been permanently horny, barely able to keep her hands off her handsome young husband; at fifty-plus, she was content with other pleasures.

She put jam on the second muffin half, poured a glass of milk and a cup of coffee, and carried everything to the breakfast nook, ignoring Tank’s mournful look. Maybe, she thought as she sat down, Jack had come, maybe she’d dredged him out of her subconscious, to protect her; all their life together he’d tried hard, if not always effectively, to do that. Or maybe he’d come to warn her?

“About his cousins,” she said to Tank. “As if I’d need warning about them.” Dreams, anyway. Who knew? Maybe she should get a book.

She was putting dishes in the dishwasher and finishing her second cup of coffee when Tank sounded his “repel all boarders” alarm. “Hush,” Rosemary told him, and waited for the sound of the door-bell before going to the door.

Baz Petrov towered there on her porch; resisting an urge to step back, Rosemary reminded herself that at six feet five, this was something he couldn’t help. However, the look on his bearded, high-nosed face was a different story. “My god, what’s that? Rosemary, I don’t like dogs.”

“I do,” she told him sweetly, and said, “Sit,” to Tank, who did. “Dogs are dependable, a trait I admire.”

“Ouch,” he said, ducking his head behind an upraised elbow.

Rosemary grinned in spite of herself. Now and then, a human being could be prodded out from behind Baz Petrov’s shield of intellectual and moral superiority. And once on the job, he did first-rate work.

“I’ve been extremely busy, Rosemary,” he went on with a shrug as he shoved his hands into the pockets of his down vest. “But I’ve been building the panels for your front fence at home, in my limited spare time. James is bringing them in his van; he’ll be here any minute. If we can get in six uninterrupted hours, we should get every-thing but the cap up today.”

“That’s nice. What about the back?”

“Now that’s a different…uh, a different crew,” he finished as her chin came up. “I’ll try to have them here tomorrow.”

“Good. Oh, by the way, this is Mike Morgan’s dog. I’ve more or less adopted him.”

Baz gave Tank a dismissive glance. “Yeah, she did have one like that. Seems to be the standard-issue canine these days.”

“You did some work for her, didn’t you?” Rosemary, coatless, was getting colder by the moment, but she didn’t want to let this chance pass.

“I did, for my sins.”

“You didn’t like her?”

“That was a woman with a serious attitude problem, Rosemary. She watched every move I made, second-guessed every decision.”

“Just like me,” said Rosemary.

“You? You didn’t? Well, maybe you did. But there’s a big difference between a little white-haired lady with a soft voice and nice manners, and a pushy, big-mouthed broad who thinks she knows how to do your job better than you do.”

“I’ll try to remember those useful distinctions. Did Mike Morgan ever say anything to you about her family or where she came from?”

“She gave orders, she made criticisms. That was the extent of our conversational contact, Rosemary. If I’d known she was going to get shot, I might have found her more interesting.” He half turned, listening. “That’s James’s old van now, I think. So, are you going to be around?”

Rosemary had had enough of Baz Petrov for one day. “I have errands to run; I’ll probably be away until late afternoon. There’s sandwich stuff and beer in the fridge, and you know how the coffee grinder works. Please lock up if you leave before I get back.”

MAIN Street in downtown Weaverville was not busy at ten A.M. Rosemary made an untroubled left turn off Main, turned left again onto a narrow tree-shaded street, and parked her truck right in front of the post office. Inside, her box yielded a handful of items but only two of immediate interest. The first was a rare and very welcome letter from her older son, Ben. Unlike his techno-geek brother, Ben used e-mail only for brief “you doin’ okay?” notes; for real communication, he preferred snail mail.

The second item, recognizable from its spiky black-ink hand-writing, was what she’d been expecting, and dreading, ever since Peter Jeffries’s message—and maybe what Jack had been trying to warn her about in her dream—a diatribe, surely, from the old lady herself, Jack’s aunt. Damn her attorney and his secretary, anyway. Tempted to drop this into the nearby wastebasket, she sighed, shoved it instead into her shoulder bag along with the rest of the packet, and went to the desk where a uniformed young woman was weighing a package.

When the sender was on his way out the door and the package had landed in a nearby bin, Rosemary stepped forward. The young woman looked up, smiled, and said, “Hi, Mrs. Mendes. You had a pretty full box today. Nice to know you’re not forgotten.”

Not necessarily. Rosemary returned the smile and said, “Jenny, may I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“Since I get my mail here at the post office, is there any way somebody could come in and find out where I actually live?”

“No ma’am. Not unless one of us knew it and told them. And we don’t do that.”

“That’s good. Thing is, I’m kind of a fussy person, and I’d just as soon not have people, even relatives, drop in on me unannounced. Being surprised isn’t always as much fun as the surprisers seem to think.”

“That’s true for sure. Oh,” she added, looking past Rosemary’s shoulder to the big front window, “you’ve got a yellow Lab, my favorite dog. That woman in the hunting accident had one looked just like yours.”

Tank was sitting now in the passenger seat of Rosemary’s truck, his handsome head swiveling back and forth as he divided his attention between sidewalk traffic and the building she’d entered. Not only was he a personable animal in himself; his breed’s general popularity was lending a certain polish to her own image. Nice dog, nice lady.

“It’s the same dog; I’ve adopted him. From Dr. Campbell, I never met Ms. Morgan myself,” Rosemary added quickly. “I’ve heard people say she was unfriendly, but she certainly did a good job in training Tank.”

“Oh, this town,” said Jenny with a grimace. “Everybody thinks it’s their right to know everybody else’s business. It drives me crazy. I thought she was way cool.”

Good word, thought Rosemary. “Really? In what way?”

“For one thing, she didn’t take any shit from the mental defectives that sometimes hang around here. A couple fairly big guys, high-school dropouts I think, started hassling her out front one day, and in about two seconds she’d slammed this one guy down on his knees with some kind of arm-lock, and had the other one backing off fast. Like I said, cool.”

“Certainly sounds cool to me,” said Rosemary. “Did she have a post office box?”

Jenny shook her head. “She came in now and then to check general delivery. I only remember a letter or something for her a couple times.”

“Probably just things like bills?”

“I don’t think so. Lots of people who live far out just do their bill-paying with their computers.” Jenny’s brow creased, and Rosemary saw herself in danger of reclassification as one of those “every-body” snoops.

“Interesting. Maybe I’ll try that myself,” she said brightly, putting on her best fluffy-headed old lady look. At the sound of foot-steps behind her, she nodded to Jenny and moved along, leaving the counter to a large woman with a towering stack of boxes.

“For traveling, boyo, you go in the back seat,” she told Tank with a directing gesture, and waited until he’d scrambled over the console into the rear before settling herself in the driver’s seat. As the dog lay down, Rosemary pulled the two letters from her bag, regarded the pair for a moment, and elected the nasty one first, saving the good for after. Did this choice reveal some self-punishing streak in her personality, she wondered? Or simply a reasonable desire to get past the bad stuff and on to the good?

The lined envelope was cream-colored, addressed to Rosemary Mendes, Weaverville, California. The letter inside, on matching notepaper, had only her name as salutation, and no complimentary closing, simply the writer’s name: Anna Mendes (Mrs. Al).

You’re an evil woman, everyone including Father Mulcahy knows that. You took your husband, my nephew, away from his true faith into an unChristian life. You refused to stay home and raise your children like a decent woman, or to participate in the family business.

“Right,” Rosemary responded aloud, “I got a real job and made money on my own instead of being an unpaid servant to ‘the family.’”

You stole money that Jack would have meant to go to the business where it belongs, depriving me, my sons, and their families. My lawyer says the Mendes family has grounds to sue you for our share, and we will do that unless you make things right at once. Do not think you can continue to run from your obligations.

“God but she’s a vile old bitch,” said Rosemary to Tank, as she had said it often to Jack. “No wonder she produced a race of poisonous slugs.”

Much as she’d have liked to tear the thing to shreds, she would need to show it to Peter Jeffries, who in spite of having a some-times dithery secretary was a highly regarded and very capable attorney. She put the note back into its envelope and the envelope into her bag, and settled back with a deep, clean breath to open the important letter. Ben, her sweet and solemn older son, had made it through medical school by dint of much financial effort on his part as well as hers and Jack’s. Now he was interning in a big hospital in Chicago and making plans to be a general practitioner or whatever they were called currently.

Ben was working hard, no news to her. Learning a lot. He liked many things about Chicago but not the weather. He was sure she was doing fine in her new, simplified, and solitary life (translation: he was worried about her) and he urged her, as he had some weeks earlier, to come to Chicago for Christmas. Clearly she would have to devise an excuse that didn’t ring any warning bells.

He had made some friends among the other interns. And one was named Amy, Rosemary noted with glee, scanning the rest of the letter and pleased to find yet another mention of the name. Quiet, serious Ben had embarked on his first romantic relationship at age twenty; it went on for several years, its end devastated him; and so far as she knew, there’d been no one since. But at twenty-seven, it’s time to try again, dear, she told him silently.

Whereas her wild-man younger son, Paul, had no doubt enjoyed his first sexual experience at thirteen, and was for all she knew living in a free-sex commune in Tucson, Arizona, where he designed computer software and played bass with a rock group called Retro-Nerds. “He’s the one who sent me my new laptop computer,” she said to Tank as she tucked Ben’s letter away and started the truck. “Which is a very good thing, because e-mail is the only way I can count on hearing from him regularly.”

Being the mother of grown sons was for Rosemary a journey through a strange land. She loved them deeply but no longer felt them part of her, something she’d created and could claim credit for or make demands of. More like, they were two wonderful young guys she was happy and fortunate to know and love. Maybe, she thought not for the first time, it would have been different with a daughter.

“So maybe I should trade you in on a girl dog,” she muttered to Tank, who cocked his head briefly but decided she didn’t mean it.

“And now what?” she said mostly to herself. She should go to Redding, for the hardware Baz had suggested for her gate, and for a new pair of hiking boots, and for…she’d surely think of several other things once she was there. A longish trip, and not a very interesting expedition from a dog’s viewpoint. But to leave him at the house with Baz and a lot of hammering…

Alternatively, they could drive north again, in search of peace and quiet and a little exercise. The day was sunny and warmish and promised to remain so for a few hours at least; it would be a shame to fail to enjoy such a gift.