CHAPTER 8

ROSEMARY DROVE one last nail, then rose from her knees and stepped back to admire her new fence. Baz Petrov’s design to her requirements, it was a civilized construct in which vertically set eight-inch boards alternated with pairs three inches wide, a narrow space left between each board and the next to admit light. At over five feet in height, six when capped, it would protect her yard without making her feel shut in.

She had planned to work on for an hour or so after Baz and his friend James left around five, but the rain that had been threatening since midday was very close now, the air dank and cold. And it had been a long, not very satisfying day. She was collecting her tools to put them away when the sound of an engine caught first Tank’s attention, then hers.

“Wait, Tank!” she ordered. The metallic turquoise of gray Campbell’s GMC flashed past the spaces in the fence and stopped. “Go ahead, boy. It’s your old buddy.”

Tank tipped his nose up for a good sniff, then trotted out to the gate, tail high. A moment later he was back, grinning: Look who I found!

Rosemary’s twinge of jealousy faded quickly as she saw how tired Gray looked. “Uh-oh, hard day. I can offer tea, but wine might be better. If your day is actually over.”

“Wine, definitely.” He planted his feet, linked his hands behind him and stretched as if to ease a back weary from bending, then straightened, dropped his hands, sighed deeply. And frowned. “A fence. You didn’t have a fence last week.”

“I don’t have one yet, quite. Baz is still putting together the cap for the wooden section, here in front; the sides and back will be chain-link.”

“Is this all to keep the dog from wandering? Rosemary, I didn’t mean to saddle you with such an expense.”

“Oh, I decided to fence months ago, when I got tired of running a salad-bar for deer. Good thing I didn’t move to Alaska; I bet it’s hard to fence out moose. And as for Tank, he rarely gets more than a dozen feet from me. Quite flattering, really. Come on inside.” She picked up her tool carrier and led the way around the side of the house to the rear door.

After the chilly outside air, the warmth of the house was welcoming. Rosemary set her toolbox down in the corner near the basement stairs, then frowned at its contents. “One glove. Tank, you rat.”

The dog, who’d followed them in, now cocked his head at her.

“Go get it. Go get the other glove. Glove,” she said again, and picked up the remaining gray-and-blue work glove to brandish it at him.

The big blond face said, clear as writing on the wall, oh, that glove. Tank flung himself around, bounded out the door, and was back in a flash, glove in his mouth.

“Impressive,” said Gray.

“Right. But he’s a lot better at retrieving than at letting go,” she said, and repeated a stern “Give!” twice before he complied and yielded his booty. She said, “Good boy, sort of,” and put the glove in the box with its mate.

“Maybe I just don’t know the proper command. I should get a book. So, red or white?” she asked gray.

“Um, red,” he replied. He was standing before her refrigerator frowning at its door, where the paper with Sabrina’s sketches was one of the items held there by magnets. “That’s Mike Morgan.”

“True,” she murmured, and turned again to the back entry hall, where a rack on a shelf held a half dozen bottles of wine.

“What’s she doing on your fridge?”

Rosemary concentrated on applying the cork-puller to a bottle of Alpen Cellars merlot, from the small winery out beyond the Petrovs’ place. “Sabrina Petrov drew that,” she said as the cork popped free.

Gray said nothing, but Rosemary was getting good at reading his face. Like, That’s not what I asked.

“I guess she interests me.” She poured wine into two glasses and handed him one. “Maybe I thought Tank would like to have it there,” she said, and kept her eyes away from his face this time, turning instead to head for the living room.

She settled into a padded wicker rocker. Gray set his wine down, shed his jacket, tossed it over the arm of the couch and slumped down beside it, stretching his legs out. “What happened to you today?” she asked.

His face lengthened, and he picked up his wineglass for a sip before answering. “I had to tell an eighty-year-old guy that we couldn’t do anything more for his sixteen-year-old Golden retriever except the kindness of putting her down. Then somebody, some kid probably, has been shooting cats with a pellet gun, five so far. And something took the throats out of two ewes and three lambs last night, out east of Lewiston. Could’ve been coyotes, but more likely feral dogs. Or a group of family pets out for a little fun.”

“Family pets?”

“Oh yeah. In fact, you’d better make sure that guy, there, isn’t loose anywhere. Farmers are very edgy right now, and might shoot anything with four legs and fur.”

“Tank wouldn’t…!”

“Rosemary, you’ve been a dog owner or keeper or whatever for maybe a week? you’d be surprised what a big, healthy dog is capable of.” Gray focused on her face and sighed. “Sorry. It was an ugly business out there. Tank probably wouldn’t.” The dog, lying on a round denim pillow beside Rosemary’s chair, thumped his tail at the sound of his name.

“Hey, a brand new dog bed. What next, ribbons on his ears?”

“The one you brought with him was too big for this room,” said Rosemary with dignity. “So I left it in the basement and got him a smaller one for up here. And he doesn’t like ribbons, but I’ve been thinking a lace collar ruff might be nice.”

Gray sputtered on his sip of wine and dug into his pocket for a handkerchief. “Absolutely. Blue for a boy, maybe. Okay, I can see you and he are getting along. Shall I tell a couple of people who’ve asked about him that he already has a good home?”

Panic fluttered for a moment, somewhere around the base of her throat: people asking for my dog? She composed herself and said, “I think that’s what you should tell them, yes.”

“Good,” he said, and Rosemary relaxed and reached down to stroke her dog’s velvety ear. One of the things she liked about Graham Campbell was that he rarely belabored a point, in his favor or someone else’s.

“So, I guess nothing new has turned up on Mike Morgan?” she asked in tones of idle interest that probably wouldn’t fool her guest.

“Not to my knowledge,” he replied, and then shrugged. “But I’ve been busy and pretty much out of the loop.”

“I was talking with Baz Petrov today, while he worked on my fence; he did the renovation on Mike Morgan’s cabin. Anyway, he found her hard to get along with, said she had a serious attitude problem.”

Gray’s mouth turned down, as if he’d tasted something unpleasant. “Baz Petrov has an ego the size of Mount Shasta.”

“I’ve more or less pointed that out to him a time or two, as has Sabrina. But he does really good work.”

“I’ll remember that. In the meantime, if Baz Petrov has any in-formation about Ms. Morgan’s life or death, he should talk to Gus Angstrom about it.”

“I think it was more opinion than information.”

“No doubt. There are probably similar opinions floating around, as they will in small towns. I hope none of them leads to trouble.”

“Gray…”

“Agh,” he groaned with an embarrassed shake of his head. “I keep sounding like somebody’s grandmother. But after that bloody mess with the sheep, I actually heard someone say something about ‘possible satanic ritual.’ ”

“Oh my. Are there satanists around here?”

He grimaced and reached for his wineglass, to sip and then rest it on his belly. “Probably not. Although I think I did hear rumors a while back about a group—or would it be a coven?—of Wiccans, down toward Hayfork. No, our edge-folks are Libertarians, survivalists, some militia types although they call themselves Constitutionalists.”

“I don’t know that Wiccans use the term ‘coven.’ And I think Baz Petrov is a Libertarian.”

“Why does that not surprise me?”

“But I don’t think he’d shoot anyone.”

“Even in our gun-happy time, Rosemary, people seldom get shot just because they’re irritating. After all, Petrov is still walking around.”

“Good point. Besides, I met Sheriff Angstrom today, and he’s pretty sure Mike Morgan was the accidental victim of a deer hunter.”

“Gus is a cop of much experience and good sense. I’d trust his judgment. How did you happen to meet him?”

“It’s a long story,” Rosemary said, and told him of her mostly inadvertent trip to Mike Morgan’s house and the devastation she’d found there. “So like a good citizen, I stopped in to let the sheriff know about it. He wasn’t upset with me for going out there, but he did tell me very politely to mind my business and not his. Which I will do. I just wish someone could find her family.”

Tank suddenly sprang from his bed and headed for the front door, announcing his displeasure in a bark that called sound from the strings of the guitar hanging on the wall. “Tank, hush!” she said. He obeyed, and she heard the noisy, rattling vehicle passing: Eddie Runyon, heading to his own home up the road.

“See, I told you no one would sneak up on you,” Gray said with a grimace. He swallowed the last of his wine and sighed. “Like I said, I’ve been busy as hell all week and I’d guess Gus has, too. It did cross my mind for a minute yesterday to ask one of the deputies—Debbie Grace—whether anything had turned up about Morgan’s origins.”

“Oh, I know Debbie. Her grandmother eats at Enders, and Debbie sometimes comes in with her.”

“Right, it was her grandmother’s two cats Debbie brought in, for their shots. But one of the beasts, a big silver Persian, gave us a hard time and pretty much absorbed all my attention. Sorry.”

“No reason to be. I’m sorry you had such a weary week. Would you like another glass of wine?”

He groaned and got to his feet. “Tired as I am, I’d fall on my face or my steering wheel. About Morgan, sometimes people leave their families—or their families kick them out—for good reasons. This business of maintaining cross-generational relationships is pretty much a human oddity, you know. Most of the animal kingdom doesn’t bother.”

And there speaks a childless man. Rosemary gave him a chilly look, which he failed to notice.

“Eventually she’ll be buried by the county. And if public notices don’t turn up any heirs, the state will claim the property.”

“Not Tank,” said Rosemary quickly.

“Not Tank,” he agreed as he shrugged his jacket on. “Even if they find Michelle Morgan’s family, the fact is, your boy there isn’t worth much except as a pet. He’s below breed standard in height, which keeps him out of the show ring, and he’s past the age for beginning serious field-dog training.”

“Too short, too old, and untrainable. Who knew we had so much in common?”

Gray opened his mouth, closed it, settled for a grin. “If you say so. I have to be in Hayfork tomorrow and Friday, but I’ll see you for dinner at my place Saturday? About six?”

“Lovely.” She got up and followed him to the door, to usher him out and then turn the deadbolt lock after him. Tank was at her heels as she carried the wineglasses to the kitchen; she fed him in the back hall and refilled his water dish. Then she heated a can of soup and sat down at the table with a bowlful and her book.

Later, putting the corked wine bottle in the cupboard, she found her attention caught again by the drawing of the free-striding Mike Morgan, and remembered that the woman’s books and discs were in the back hall, carried in from her truck because of the threat of rain. If she left them in their containers she could turn them right over to the sheriff tomorrow or whenever he asked for them.

Or she could take them out and look them over.

ROSEMARY built a small fire in the fireplace, settled herself on the floor there, and began to sort through Mike Morgan’s personal library of some fifty or so volumes, nearly all in paperback and most very used-looking. In fact, several she flipped open had a mark-down price pencilled inside. There were mysteries, a mix of the British kind she enjoyed and the American ones Jack had preferred. A couple of fat paperback historical romances, several westerns, three that looked like science fiction or fantasy.

A handful of “straight” novels and short-story collections, most of these in trade paper and mostly by women: Barbara kingsolver, Alice Hoffman, Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, Alice Munro, Annie Proulx. Something called My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys, by three women she’d never heard of. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which Rosemary had read, and Persuasion, which she had not; on the inside cover of each she found the name S. Petrov neatly printed. Three battered hardback novels: Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland and an interesting-sounding pair by Ivan Doig: Dancing at the Rascal Fair and English Creek.

Mike Morgan’s nonfiction reading had leaned mostly toward nature rather than people. There was a book by Barry Lopez and one by John McPhee, both names Rosemary recognized as favorites of her older son. She added to this stack a book about a killer forest fire, a book by a commercial fisherwoman, a book about a river, and a small volume called A Sand County Almanac, with a reference to John Muir on the cover. A hiking and backpacking guide to the Trinity Alps looked interesting and useful; Rosemary set it aside and discovered beneath it a familiar cover that made her sit back on her heels for a moment.

The Klamath Knot had occupied pride of place on Ben’s bookshelf since the teenage summer he’d spent camping in the Siskiyous. Once, in a time of turmoil, Rosemary had picked it up and found herself briefly but blessedly lost in David Rains Wallace’s graceful evocation of a singular landscape, its evolution and its myths. How strange that she herself was now in a part of the area he’d described.

She shook her head, not in negation but to clear it. Only one book remained before her: a hardback with a tattered cover, Bonnie Bergin’s Guide to Bringing Out the Best in Your Dog.

“Well, I guess she did that,” Rosemary remarked to Tank, who was curled close beside her. “And besides that, she read a lot; there are enough books here to make a person happy for weeks and weeks. Months. I wonder if the sheriff will let me keep them.”

She got to her knees and replaced all but the dog book in the two crates, segregating those she hadn’t read and wanted to try from those she wasn’t interested in. The photo frame she’d tucked in at the last minute was a well-made wooden one, she noted, with four photos of Tank, from pudgy, incredibly cute puppy to adult head-shot, mounted behind glass. She propped it up on the mantel, where it would be safe until she decided where on her wall to put it.

A more perfunctory survey of the music in the basket revealed that some of the CDs were contemporary pop and rock, groups she recognized vaguely from the stuff her boys had played at home. Another group was more interesting: Nancy Griffith, The Dixie Chicks, Gillian Welch, Lucinda Williams, Alison Krauss and Union Station. Five Grateful Dead albums. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, two Mozart piano concertos, a boxed set of the Beethoven symphonies.

“Oh, my,” said Rosemary. “Trying to catch up, like me? Or reaching back to the familiar?” Better if she’d left all this, books and music both, in the cabin where they belonged. She was sliding deeper into an unhealthy identification here, making an alter ego, a now-lost friend, of this dead young woman. Maybe she should get away for a while, go visit Ben in Chicago or…

Right. Run away from her own fantasies. And what about Tank? “Get a grip, Rosemary,” she advised herself.

The ring of the telephone made her stiffen her back and catch her breath as she remembered what the sheriff had told her. Perhaps he had not given out her phone number; but perhaps that inquiring person had gone on to find someone more talkative. She got to her feet and turned toward her desk, to listen.

After the fourth ring, Rosemary heard her own voice: “Please leave a message.” A long pause followed, and then the click of a hang-up.