CHAPTER 13

EARS UP and tail high, Tank was bouncing about and whining like a small boy who can’t wait to set off for the beach. Rosemary, who knew by now that his bladder capacity was phenomenal, pushed him aside and went about her own just-out-of-bed pursuits in her own good time. When she came out of the bathroom, he made a beeline not for the back door but for the front, and stood there shifting from foot to foot and vocalizing until she turned the deadbolt night lock and opened the door.

Tank shot out past her, ignoring his favorite bushes in his urgency to reach the front gate and dive headfirst into something Rosemary couldn’t quite make out. “Tank! Come back here,” she called, but he ignored her, rooting and snorting.

“Tank!” she called again, and he lifted his head for a moment to look back at her, a piece of his find trailing from his mouth. Rosemary vaulted down the steps and ran along the flagstone path to find her dog wallowing in a vile-smelling heap of offal—shiny ropes of intestines clotted with dark blood and chunks of other internal stuff. And a hoof. Rosemary had never hunted with her family, but she felt safe in assuming that this hoof had belonged to a deer.

“Tank!” But she knew he wouldn’t come. Short of stepping into that mess and dragging him out… Slippered feet uncertain on the flagstones, bathrobe flapping about cold, bare legs, she ran to the side of the house, snatched up her hose, and turned it on full jet-stream force. “Tank, get away! Off! Drop that!”

He shook his head and sputtered as the water hit him, whined and dropped his prize and lurched to one side, out of that hard cold stream. “Come!” she ordered again, aiming the hose away, and he obeyed slowly, slinking toward her low-bellied. She twisted the nozzle shut, dropped the hose and reached for his collar, to drag him toward the back door.

And reconsidered, making instead for the corner of the front porch, where she’d attached a thick nylon rope to the post several days earlier. She snapped the clip at the rope’s end to the dog’s collar, told him, “Sit!” and went to retrieve the hose.

When her chastened animal had been hosed clean, she took him indoors to the basement where she toweled him down, fed him, and told him to stay and be quiet. Upstairs again, she belted her wet robe more tightly around her, shoved her bare feet into rubber boots and her hands into rubber gloves, and strode out to deal with the mess. In spite of the early-morning chill, she was not cold at all, but warmed to near-fever state by fury.

Sometime during the night, an evil person—Eddie Runyon, it had to be—had delivered to her yard the viscera of a deer he’d shot. As she used a plastic dustpan to scoop his gift into a plastic garbage bag, Rosemary wished on her tormentor a multitude of ills. “Boils,” she said as she straightened to draw a clean breath. “Shingles. Rotting, falling-out teeth. Two broken legs!”

Everything scoopable having been scooped, Rosemary set the bag aside and went to get the hose. As the stream of water scoured flagstones clean and muddied the ground between, she had a quick vision of her dog being pounded into submission by this same method. Poor old Tank had after all merely been enjoying himself in the manner of his ancestors. Chances were, when his forebears had brought down prey, its soft midsection was the choice feasting site for the successful hunter. “Menudo,” said Rosemary. “Sweetbreads. Who are we to claim superiority?”

She put the hose away and realized that she was very wet and cold, with a nasty taste clinging to the back of her throat. She went inside for a hot shower, dressed quickly in jeans and an almost-new, still-plushy sweatshirt, and made herself a cup of coffee which she drank standing at her kitchen window, barely aware that the morning sun was finally poking bright rays through a scatter of small clouds.

Rosemary could still hear her dog’s sorrowful complaints as she pulled out of her yard and pointed her truck up Willow Lane. Moments later, she turned in past the mailbox that said RUNYON in un-even black letters, and drove up the bumpy driveway.

The clear light was cruel to the mobile home, illuminating every ugly line; it looked like an ancient metal dinosaur that had dragged itself to the top of the low hill and died there, dropping pieces of its body all round. Rosemary noted an old refrigerator, the remains of an ancient sedan, a rusty small tractor with only one rear tire, and other shapes not immediately identifiable.

She felt a pang of sorrow for Kim, wondering how the woman managed to keep herself and her son so neatly turned-out with this as starting point. She herself would have been depressed into immobility. She was almost ready to turn around and abandon her purpose when the front door opened and Eddie Runyon surged out onto the sagging front porch, waving a fist at her. Pointing a finger. Shouting something. Looking angry and ugly, clearly intent on intimidating her. The creep.

She parked her truck, jumped out, and trotted around to the rear, to reach in over the tailgate.

“Listen, woman, you better keep your mouth off me, you hear? I saw you coming out of the sheriff’s office yesterday, I know the kind of things you been saying and I’m not about to let some stringy old bitch—”

Rosemary pulled the plastic bag from the truckbed, holding it at arm’s length as she approached Eddie. When he was only a few feet away, she upended it in his direction, and the contents stopped just short of his boots.

“Oh, Jesus. Jesus Christ!” He sprang backwards, face going greeny-white as he made a wordless, croaking sound, clapped one hand over his mouth, and turned to run back to his house.

“Good heavens,” said Rosemary softly. Eddie stumbled, caught himself just short of his front steps, swerved and stumbled again as he changed direction, toward the truck parked beside the mobile home. He hit its side with a thud, yanked the door open and climbed in, fired it up, and drove off in a whirl of dust.

Watching this flight, Rosemary said, “Good heavens,” again. At a noise from behind her, she turned to see Kim Runyon clattering down the wooden steps.

“What the fuck?” She looked after the disappearing truck, then turned her glare on Rosemary. “What did you do to Eddie?”

“I just brought back something he left at my house last night.” Rosemary gestured at the mess on the ground, and Kim looked.

“Yuck. Who…? Hey, you’re crazy. No way would Eddie have had anything to do with that!”

“It’s deer season, Kim, and that’s a deer, or rather, parts of a deer. And Eddie was looking for deer out northeast of here when I came across him last week.”

Kim was shaking her head.

“And he’s very angry with me, you must have heard him shouting.”

Kim turned to head back toward her front porch, where she collapsed onto the steps and put her head in her hands. “You don’t understand. Eddie can’t handle the sight of blood, not even his own. Tyler, stop right there!”

She rose to snatch up her son as he tried to edge past her. “You stay right here by me, hear? Or I’ll tie you up again, I swear.”

Startled by this promise, Rosemary followed Kim’s gesture and saw a line attached to the porch post, much like the one she herself had used to restrain Tank except that this one ended in a child-sized chest harness. Probably a perfectly good idea for this particular child.

“You saw how he lit out of here,” Kim went on. “I mean, it’s a miracle he didn’t pass out, or at least throw up.”

“Kim, I can’t believe—”

“Oh, shit!” Kim straightened and looked toward the road. “He took the damned truck, no telling when he’ll get back, and today’s the monthly prenatal and well-baby clinic. I’ve got appointments for me and Tyler both. Shit!”

Eddie had been wearing ragged jeans and a stained sweatshirt. Mother and son, however, were well scrubbed and neatly dressed. Feeling obscurely guilty, Rosemary looked up to meet Kim’s glare.

“Well?” snapped the younger woman.

An elderly but well-maintained wooden house adjacent to the community hospital was clearly the site of the clinic. At least a dozen small children rocketed around on the lawn there, with maybe half that many weary and/or pregnant mothers watching. “I don’t know how long we’ll be,” said Kim as she stepped down and reached back in to collect Tyler. “We’re on time, but the doctors are always real busy and they sometimes get behind.”

“I’ll leave the truck here in the hospital lot,” said Rosemary. “And go have coffee.”

Kim’s muttered “Thanks” did not ring with sincerity. She trudged away, the ever-recalcitrant Tyler pulling back against her grip with every step.

LARSON’S Coffee Shop on Main Street did not look busy. Rosemary, suddenly aware that she’d had no breakfast, went in and ordered a cup of Colombian coffee, a pineapple Danish, and a blueberry muffin, wondering aloud to the waitress where everyone was.

“At church,” was the reply, delivered with a frown.

“How nice. I’ve been,” said Rosemary sweetly. Some years ago, but probably it still counted. She took a seat at a corner table where a tourist, bless him or her, had left a copy of yesterday’s New York Times.

“Sneaking around to read the competition, are you?” Glenna Doty, a stainless steel traveling mug in her hand, pulled out a chair and sat down.

“If I could get same-day delivery here, I’d subscribe,” admitted Rosemary. “Hello, Glenna. Would you like a piece of my Danish?”

“God, no, can’t stand sweet stuff. You should read theTimes on-line, that’s what I do. Saves having to dispose of all that paper, too. But for the local weekly, my friend, what’s this I hear about some-body smashing up your truck?”

You mean you haven’t heard about the deer guts? Rosemary kept that compelling sentence to herself. “Someone shot out my windshield Thursday night. It’s been repaired.”

“Any idea who?”

“The sheriff is working on it, but I don’t think he has any suspects. Glenna, I’m not sure I’m going to make the deadline.”

“Beg pardon?” Glenna’s eyebrows shot up.

“For the piece on Michelle Morgan. You said Tuesday was the deadline.”

“Oh, that’s just my little way of dealing with civilians. Get it in later, we’ll just put it in next week’s issue. You finding out anything interesting?”

Rosemary didn’t appreciate being “dealt with.” “I guess you’ll know when I deliver it.”

“Fair enough,” said Glenna with a shrug. She rose, sketched a wave, and left.

THE truck was still empty, and there was no sign of Kim or Tyler. Rosemary put a paper bag with a leftover muffin half in the center console, cast one further look around, and set off for Main Street again. The sidewalks were busy; either church services were over or the town was home to more heathens than the waitress had implied. Or maybe it was just that the sky was a color calling to mind the phrase “October’s bright blue weather,” and the sun was delivering an honest warmth.

Rosemary sauntered along, nodding to familiar faces, sidestep-ping the occasional sidewalk-wide group of teenagers. Nearing the west end of the historic section, she glanced across the street and was surprised and pleased to see that the door to Harrison’s Book-shop was open.

She said as much a few minutes later, and Sue Harrison shrugged. “In today’s world, any small business owner who wants to eat stays open on Sundays. Besides, I like it here; my house is a mess.”

The store was indeed a cozy place, with a coffee corner and a friendly gray cat and hand-lettered signs directing browsers. Rosemary looked over new fiction, poked around in used fiction, found something she’d been thinking about in LITERATURE, PAPERBACK. And noticed something interesting in pets.

“Nice edition, isn’t it?” said Sue as Rosemary handed her Bleak House and a twenty-dollar bill. “I guess you must have a lot of time to read.”

“Since I retired, I’ve been trying to read at least one catch-up book for every three mysteries or whatever.”

“Catch-up?”

“Books I’d have read if I’d stayed in college instead of getting married and going to work.”

“Ah. Well, you’ll enjoy this one.”

Rosemary accepted her change and the paper-bagged book. “I notice you have quite a number of dog-training books. Did Michelle Morgan buy hers here?”

Sue’s lean, mobile face settled into lines of sadness, and her bright hazel eyes seemed to dim. “Yes, she did. I thought that book was a bit new-age, but she liked it. She was crazy about that big dog of hers.” She shook her head. “I hope the bastard who shot her stepped on a rabid skunk on his way out of the woods.”

Rosemary repeated her mantra: “I didn’t know her, but I’ve adopted her dog. From his behavior, I’d say the book worked well.”

Sue shrugged and spread her hands. “So what do I know, I have four cats. Mike came in fairly often to go through my used paper-backs. When she found out I live alone, she decided I needed a dog, too, and kept trying to convert me. I miss her,” she added softly.

“Did she ever talk about her family or where she’d come from?”

“Oh, no, not Mike. Miss ‘ask me no questions,’ she was; I tried to trip her up, but never got anywhere. We talked about her dog, and my cats. And my horse; I have this half-Arab mare that more or less came with my property when I bought it five years ago. Mike came out and rode her a time or two. She was a lot better-looking on a horse than I am.”

“Could I come visit your horse some day?” The words were out of Rosemary’s mouth before she realized they were forming in her mind.

“Absolutely. She loves company, and she needs more exercise than I give her.”

“Well, maybe it’s a bad idea,” said Rosemary hastily. “I haven’t been on a horse for twenty-five years.” She looked at her watch, and realized that an hour and a half had passed since she’d dropped Kim off at the clinic. “Oh, one other thing. Several people have asked me about Tank—Mike Morgan’s dog. About his breeding. Do you have any idea where she got him?”

She shook her head. “From a hunting-dog breeder somewhere in California, that’s all I remember. Probably the north part of the state; I do remember that Mike felt about the south state the way most of us up here do. Never if you can help it venture south of Big Sur.”

AT the clinic, Kim was coming across the lawn with Tyler in her arms, burying his head in her neck and bellowing from pain or out-rage. Rosemary hurried to the truck to open the passenger door, and Kim clambered in.

“Shots?” Rosemary asked as she settled into her own seat.

“Oh, yeah. But the real killer was when they took blood, you know, where they stab a finger. He hates that. Tyler, shut up! Or I’ll just leave you here.”

Rosemary opened the console, pulled out the paper bag, and set it on the dash in front of her. “Tyler, this is a muffin. You may have it when you stop crying.”

It took him about ten seconds. Then Kim wiped his face and fastened the seat belt over herself and her son, and Rosemary handed him the muffin. When they had pulled out onto the busy street, Rosemary looked at her neighbor. “And how are you, Kim?”

“Healthy as a horse, and so’s the kid. The new one.”

“Ah,” said Rosemary, and concentrated on her driving.

“Eddie’s real worried about it, how we’ll afford it. And my mom plain wants me to get rid of it.”

“What do you want?”

“I can’t do that. See, I got no problem with what other women do, but me, I just—can’t. Besides, I think this one might be a girl.” She cast a look of distaste at her son, who was cramming muffin into his mouth. “Say, Rosemary. I was kind of nauseous this morning, didn’t eat breakfast. If you’d stop at the taquería down the street, I could pick up some burritos.”

Half an hour later, Rosemary turned the truck from the high-way onto Willow Lane. Tyler was whining and cradling the hand his mother had slapped when he insisted on pulling at the bag of burritos; Kim was silent, staring straight ahead through the sun-struck windshield. Rosemary took a disinterested pleasure in the aroma of the burritos while looking forward to an afternoon of solitude and her new book.

“Rosemary, you got any beer at home?”

“What?” Rosemary’s front fence was just ahead.

“’Cause I don’t. And a beer would sure be good with a burrito. I got one for you, too.”

On top of the Danish and half muffin. Rosemary tossed a side-ways look at her passenger, who was still looking resolutely straight ahead. What was up here?

“I have some beer, yes.” She parked in front of her gate. “Would you like to come in?”

Clearly, she would. Hostess time, thought Rosemary. But that didn’t mean she had to turn Tyler loose in her house. “It’s warm in the sun. Why don’t we just sit here on the porch? And I’ll quiet my dog down and leave him inside,” she added, watching Tyler flinch at Tank’s loud complaints.

The burritos were good; Rosemary managed to eat half of hers and wrapped the rest up for later. Kim ate her own and finished Tyler’s, while he fussed and whined and, after several sips from his mother’s beer bottle, lay down on the warm wood of the porch and went to sleep.

“Would you like another bottle of beer, Kim?”

“No, I better not. I figure I can get away with one, but that’s it.”

Rosemary sipped from her own bottle and decided to get the show on the road. “Kim, where was Eddie when Mike Morgan got killed?”

“See, I knew that’s where you were headed all along!” Kim lowered her voice as Tyler shifted and whimpered.

“Do you know where he was? It was just over two weeks ago.”

“I know that. And I was in Corning visiting my aunt. I got back the day before they found her body.”

“Was Eddie with you?”

She shook her head. “He had to work, and he had stuff to do around home. Our septic tank’s been giving trouble, so he had it pumped out. But here’s what I wanted to tell you, once and for all. Just you, okay? Eddie never shoots anything. He can’t even kill a chicken. I mean, he pretends to look forward to deer season, but then he gets a cold, or strains his back, or like that. And you saw how he was about that stuff in the bag.”

Rosemary thought this over. “Perhaps I was wrong to blame him for the deer guts. But does he go out hunting, when his friends go?”

“Not if he can help it. Well, if Steve—that’s his cousin, only more like a big brother and Eddie’s idea of a ‘real man’—if Steve is going, and gets on him about it, he’ll go. But I asked him, and he said he didn’t go hunting while I was away.”

“Suppose,” said Rosemary slowly, “he was out with his buddies pretending to hunt. And he fired blindly and hit Mike Morgan by accident.”

Kim just shook her head, eyes down.

“Then what would he have done?”

“Run away,” said Kim. With one hand on the shoulder of her sleeping son, she lifted her chin and looked at Rosemary squarely. “And why is this any of your business?”

“Because he should have…” Rosemary faltered.

“The paper said she was hit in the head. Dead, nothing anybody could do. If somebody shot her by accident, all he’d do by turning himself in would be screw up his own life. Or his family’s.”

“But what about her family?”

“What about them? She’s still dead. Maybe when somebody locates them, whoever and wherever they are, they’ll want to find out who did it for themselves. But it won’t help Mike Morgan any at all, and it’s none of your business.”

Tyler, apparently wakened by the harshness of his mother’s voice, squirmed and sat up and began to cry. “Hush, baby,” said Kim. “Rosemary, I need to put him down for a nap. Could you run us home?”

 

1990

THE MERCEDES’S high-beams picked out the trail that angled off to the right from the gravel road toward the river, and Conroy swung the big car hard into the turn, slowing as the rutted ground gripped its tires. Ahead, lights glimmered through brush and spindly pines; he flipped off the air conditioner, lowered his front windows, and heard raised voices and loud music.

He pulled to a stop at the edge of what might have been a set scene lit by twin spotlights from a Modoc County Sheriff’s Department vehicle: blankets on the ground, cooler chests, a scatter of beer cans, a blaring boom-box. The ranch pickup was parked at the far edge of the picture, his daughter leaning against a fender. Brianna wore a cropped tank top that reached just below her breasts, and tight shorts cut low enough to leave most of her tanned belly bare. As his lights hit her, she straightened and struck a pose, hip cocked and breasts thrust out; her hair, recently bleached almost white, seemed to glow .

“Goddammit, girl!” he roared, exploding from the car. “You look like some kind of whore!”

“Hi, Daddy. You ought to know, right?”

His full-armed backhanded slap caught the side of her head and sent her staggering. As Conroy lunged forward to break her fall, a weight hit him from behind, an arm circling his neck, legs clinging, a fist hammering his ear.

“Off, dammit, or I’ll break your fuckin’ arm!” Deputy Buzz Ryder peeled the body off Conroy’s back, wrenching the struggling figure’s arms behind him. In the lights now, the attacker was revealed to be a lean, dark-skinned boy wearing cut-off Levi’s and a face full of rage. “Sorry, B.D.” Ryder opened the back door of the white county sedan and tossed the boy inside. “Stay there!”

“Who the hell is that little prick?”

“Nobody.” Ryder gave his own lanky frame a shake, dusted his hands against his pants, and went to turn off the music. “Got a call about noise and the usual down here, two other carloads of kids took off before I could stop ’em.”

“We weren’t doing anything!” Brianna stood upright now, hugging herself against a chill real or imagined.

“Little bare-ass swimming, little beer drinking, that’s all it looked like to me,” said the deputy with a shrug. “They all appeared to be underage.”

“Buzz, I’d appreciate it if—”

“I didn’t get a real good look at the others,” said Ryder. “So it’d hardly be fair to get official with these two. And I’ll see this one gets home. Okay?”

Conroy shot a glare toward the figure behind the screen in the sedan, but didn’t argue. “Sure, okay. I’ll take my daughter home, send somebody to get the truck and clean up the mess. And Buzz, thanks for calling me,” he added, and shook the deputy’s hand warmly.

As the white sedan pulled away, Brianna said, “I can drive myself home,” and was climbing into the truck when her father, leaping to stop her, hit the half-open door instead and slammed it hard on her hand. His “oh, Jesus!” nearly drowned out her yelp of pain.

“Goddammit, why can’t you just…? Brianna, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Here, let me have a look.” As he pulled the door wide, she cradled her left hand in her right, slid to her feet, and said, “No, it’s okay, no big deal. Just leave me alone.”

He blew out a long breath. “Let’s get you in the car, and we’ll have a look when we get home.”

Belted into the Mercedes’s passenger seat, Brianna sat with legs outstretched and head up, staring straight ahead. When they’d reached the paved road and were headed toward the ranch, she took a deep breath and turned to look at him. “Look, Daddy—”

“Brianna, the car door was an accident and I’m sorry, but I couldn’t let you drive. And it was wrong of me to hit you and I apologize for that, too; you’re my daughter and I love you. But I’ve got a busy summer schedule and really need you to help me, and instead I had to leave a bunch of important people standing around the pool at the house to come out here to get you before you wind up in jail.”

“I didn’t ask to be a politician’s daughter.” She turned her gaze forward again and lifted her chin. “I hate sucking up to people I don’t like just because they’re ‘important’ to you.”

“You didn’t ask, but that’s what you got. And it’s not ‘sucking up’ to be polite to people who help me to make us a very decent living.”

“Look at me, Daddy! I’m not a little girl anymore, I’m sixteen! I want to go out with my friends and have a good time!”

He did look at her, with a grimace. “You listen to me, young lady! I’m not going to have my daughter running around looking and acting like a tramp! Kind of good time you want, you’ll be pregnant in no time. I’m grounding you for the rest of the summer, until school starts and I can send you back to Sacramento and St. Ursula’s.”

“But you promised I could go to high school in Alturas this fall!”

“I didn’t promise, I said maybe. Sammie said that was a mistake.”

“Sammie’s not my goddamned mother!”

“Right, but I’m your father. Who was that kid, anyway?”

She blinked back tears and shook her head. “None of your business. But he wouldn’t have got me pregnant. I’ve been on the pill for months.”

“You’ve been…? Jesus Christ, Brianna! What the hell am I gonna do with you?”

“How about nothing? That would be a nice change.”