Chapter Four

IT TAKES SOME digging, but Sam finds her: Donna Rey, Joel Troutman’s mistress. She has a little house in Dewey, east of the 69. A shoebox house, painted pastel blue with a dark shingled roof and white trim. She’s unmarried and lives alone with her two dogs.

Montgomery knocks on her door late one Wednesday afternoon, about a week and a half after riding with Sam, and when she answers, she’s barefoot in a pair of cut-off denim shorts and a white blouse. She has her hair up in a messy, just-rolled-out-of-bed style, and it looks soft, locks hanging around her face. She reminds him of the pinup models he’d see in his dad’s skin magazines from the ’70s, stashed away in an old portable cooler in the garage. Innocent, baby-blue eyes and peachy cheeks. She’s wearing a lot of black mascara. He can tell she’s in her mid-to-late thirties, but she has a youthful quality about her.

“Donna?” Montgomery says when she opens the door.

“Can I help you?” she says behind the screen door.

“I’m here to talk about Joel.”

A mix of emotions flicker across her face. “Come on in.”

Montgomery follows her inside, holding his hat in both hands and stepping on the carpet like he doesn’t want to disturb the house. He can see the dogs watching him from the other side of the sliding glass door leading into the backyard. They don’t bark. They just look at him.

Donna goes into the kitchen and takes a couple glasses from the cupboard. “You want something to drink? Water, lemonade, iced tea?”

“Iced tea’ll be fine,” he says to oblige her hospitality.

She pours the tea into both glasses, and he sits at the kitchen counter opposite her, his back to the living room.

“Are you a friend of Joel’s?” She sets one glass of iced tea in front of him.

“Not exactly.”

“Then, how do you know about me and him?”

“Somebody at Billy Jack’s told me about ya’ll. I had to find you on my own.”

Donna ducks her head as if she’s embarrassed that anybody remembers seeing her and Troutman in public together.

“Let’s not give each other the runaround, Donna,” says Montgomery. “You know Joel’s been missing since he held up the diner in Prescott. I want to know where he is.”

“Why?” she says, blue eyes rolling up to meet his stare.

“His wife’s looking for him.”

Donna pauses, taking in the fact that Montgomery is supposedly here on behalf of Mrs. Troutman. “Does she know about me?”

“No. I don’t have any reason to tell her about you. She asked me to help her find him before the cops do, so that’s what I’m doing.”

Donna raises her eyes to the ceiling as if silently thanking God. She looks cherubic when she does, blonde hair like a halo.

Montgomery wonders why she’s the secretive type of mistress instead of the vindictive, exhibitionist type. Does she love Joel? Enough to want to make his life easy at her own expense? Can she love him that much and still give him up to a stranger?

“Do they know for sure it was him?” she asks, hope and dread blended in her tone. “I’ve been going crazy ever since he disappeared. I haven’t been able to ask anyone about him, and he hasn’t called or stopped by…”

“As far as I know, they’re sure.”

Donna wilts, gaze falling to the countertop. She’s always wanted to believe Troutman is better than he is, Montgomery can tell.

He sips his tea and lets the truth sink in.

“What’s his wife going to do?” Donna asks. “If he comes back? Is she going to leave with him?”

Montgomery watches her, pausing before he answers. “I don’t know. I think right now, she’s a panicked woman who wants to talk to her husband.”

Donna closes her eyes and presses the heels of her hands to her forehead, fingertips against her scalp. She breathes. “I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe he would do something like that. Why would he do something like that? Is he really so hard up? He never told me anything…”

Montgomery hunches over, elbows on the counter, curling his hand around his glass. “You know where he might be, Donna?”

She glances at him, snags her bottom lip in her teeth. She’s trying to decide whether helping Montgomery would be protection or betrayal.

Montgomery looks into her eyes and thinks of Sam. “If he’s going to get out of this, he needs somebody on his side. We can’t help him if he’s in the wind.”

She folds her hands around the base of her glass and looks into her iced tea.

Montgomery stares at her and wonders: Where did she think her affair with Troutman was headed? What’s this woman’s story? What makes her the one who ended up becoming Troutman’s mistress?

“There’s this place,” she finally says. “An old trailer where we would meet to be together. I’ve wanted to go so many times since he left, see if he might be there, but—I’m afraid.” She almost laughs, breaking into a toothy smile. “I don’t know why. Maybe I’m afraid the place will be empty, you know? That he’s really gone.”

Montgomery sets his glass down and leans forward, arm on the counter. “Where?”

*

THEY LIE THERE, motionless, for a while. Catching their breath. Her face is covered in a curtain of blonde hair, and Sam can smell her shampoo and rose-scented soap on her skin. She rolls off of him and lies in the bed next to him for a few minutes before getting up and crossing the room to the tall wooden dresser. She retrieves her pack of cigarettes and lighter, lights one up, and lopes back to the other side of the room.

Sam watches her. She’s tall for a woman, about five nine, with a long back and slender limbs. Narrow hips and wide shoulders, a little bit of muscle tone in her arms. She has a slim waist but a soft belly. She picks her silk robe off the hook on the back of the door, puts it on, and stretches out in the big, upholstered armchair facing her corner of the bed. The midnight-blue robe has tiny white dots all over it, the hem and the ends of the sleeves striped with rosebud-pink, green, and white paisley, and a row of birds with their wings outstretched. With the cigarette in her hands, she almost looks like an old-time movie star.

She smokes in silence until Sam sits up, his back against the pillow and headboard. She watches him, and he avoids her at first, then meets her gaze. When she grins, he smiles in turn.

“You’re good, Deputy,” she says. “Better than I expected.”

“I don’t know. Seems to me you do most of the work.”

“I know what I like. But don’t sell yourself short.” She draws on the cigarette and taps the ash into a metal plate on the floor he told her to use the first time she came over. “We need to have the talk now, don’t we?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, the conversation about keeping this casual. You tell me you’re into me, but you aren’t ready for anything serious. Reassure me more times than necessary that it’s really got nothing to do with me, to make yourself feel better. I accept gracefully and go home after agreeing to call you when I want to fuck again.”

Sam ducks his head, arms draped over his knees bent up in front of him.

“Except,” she says, “that conversation is pointless because I don’t want this to be more involved either.”

He looks up at her again, surprised.

She smiles, satisfied with herself, and smokes. “Don’t get me wrong. You’re a great guy, Sam. But I’m happy with my life the way it is. And I had a feeling the moment I met you that you’re not exactly desperate for a girlfriend. It’s one reason I picked you.”

He almost laughs. “Well, you’re obviously the smart one in the room.”

She slouches in the chair, reaching her long legs to touch the corner of the bed with her feet. “Any other single woman in this town would definitely meet your expectations. You happened to run into the exception.”

Lauren Baker is nothing like Sam’s ex-wife. She reminds him of a lion, with her honey-blonde hair and dark-brown eyes and the way she prowls wherever she goes. No matter what she wears, she looks ready to strip it off. She’s more sexually aggressive than just about every woman Sam’s been with. In her late thirties, she’s never been married nor had kids, which is peculiar for a woman in these parts. A native of Flagstaff, she moved down to Prescott five years ago because she wanted to distance herself from the people she knew.

Like many of Prescott’s residents who aren’t retirees, she lives in town rather than outside its limits. She has a bachelor’s and a master’s in astronomy from NAU, spent nine years with the Flagstaff Fire Department after graduation, and now works two jobs: firefighting and teaching at Embry-Riddle, the local aeronautical university. She drives a salmon-pink 1957 Lincoln Premiere, and she drinks whiskey straight out of the bottle. Her favorite pastimes include throwing darts in bars, screwing male tourists, and climbing trees. When Sam met Lauren in the summertime, she was wearing a pair of denim shorts that barely covered any thigh and expensive red cowboy boots several years old. She has great legs and a great laugh.

They sit in silence for a while as Lauren smokes in the chair, and Sam looks at her.

“Am I allowed to ask you a personal question?” he says.

She gives him a saucy grin. “You’re a sheriff’s deputy. I think you can interrogate me anytime you want.”

“Do you have any close friends here? In town?”

“I think we’re getting closer every time we see each other,” she says, playful and flirtatious.

Sam wants an honest answer to his honest question, but he doesn’t know how to ask her to drop the sexy act without sounding rude. “I mean, are you close to someone you aren’t having sex with? Someone you can count on, who really knows you and cares about you?”

Lauren takes a drag. “There are people I like, who like me. Most of them are men. Some of them I’ve been with, some of them I haven’t. It’s hard for me to keep women as friends. They’re always worried I’ll steal their boyfriend or their husband or the guy they want to be with. Or we don’t have enough in common. Around here, they’re all married with kids. You know how it is.”

“So, no one close? No best friend?”

“Nope.” Lauren puffs on her cigarette, her hand elegantly posed. “Why? Are you in the market?”

He smiles for a second, then looks down into his lap. “I’ve been here four months, and I don’t really have any friends. I don’t see the other deputies outside of work, and there don’t seem to be many guys my age in this town, let alone ones who aren’t married with kids.”

“I know how you feel. Sort of. Married people are no fun—and even if they could be, they don’t usually want to spend time with someone who reminds them what it was like to be free.”

Sam pauses, and Lauren notices his face.

“What?” she says.

He shakes his head. “I’m divorced, and if I’m any freer now than when I was married, it doesn’t feel like much.”

“Do you miss your ex?”

There is no simple answer to that question. Sam thinks of Jen less now than when he first moved to Prescott, but sometimes, he does miss her. He doesn’t regret his divorce. He wouldn’t go back to her even if he could. But when he’s home alone at night, watching television or lying awake in bed, he wishes he could call her—to hear a familiar voice. It’s hard to miss who she was and what they had when they were falling in love without forgetting she isn’t that woman anymore, and he isn’t that man. Even if they reconciled now, their relationship wouldn’t be the one he remembers when he looks at the only wedding photo he kept.

“No,” he tells Lauren. “I don’t miss her. I guess I don’t know how to be single anymore. It’s not the same as it was when I was in my twenties.”

“Of course it isn’t,” Lauren says, sitting up and dropping the cigarette butt in the ashtray on the floor. “But hey, you got divorced for a reason, right?”

Sam nods. He runs his hands back through his hair and exhales, resting his elbows on his knees in front of him, the sheet tented around him. He looks at Lauren and debates talking to her about something else that’s been on his mind. He decides to take a chance. “You ever been in love?”

She laughs, leaning back in the chair again, her feet on the floor now. “Hell, I don’t know. I thought I was a bunch of times in high school and college, but I’m pretty sure I was just a horny kid with a big imagination. I’ve never met anyone I wanted to be with the rest of my life. If I had, I would’ve married him.”

Sam waits a moment before asking his next question. “You ever have feelings for another woman?”

Lauren looks at him like he’s joking. “No. Why? Do you fuck men?”

Sam shakes his head. “I didn’t ask about sex. I asked about feelings.”

“Well, shit, Sam, feelings usually go hand in hand with sex, don’t they? Unless you’re talking about some other kind I know nothing about.”

He’s not sure what he’s talking about. He’s only ever dated women. He’s never wanted to have sex with men, but there have been a couple times where he thought he felt something for a man that wasn’t any different than the romantic love he felt for his ex-girlfriends. His best friend in high school was Brian Dunne. He remembers stargazing with him in a field one night when they were seventeen, after splitting a six-pack of beer Brian took from his dad’s stash. Sam looked at Brian’s face in the dark as the most intense love he ever felt suddenly washed over him. Sam wanted to kiss him.

In college, his closest friend was a guy named Andy Albright. They got drunk together once, right after Melanie Schaefer dumped Andy, and made out with each other in the privacy of Sam’s bedroom after returning from the bar, then fell asleep in his bed together. Afterward, they pretended like nothing happened, and their friendship survived until graduation.

Sam’s never told anyone about the feelings he had for those male friends. Not even his ex-wife knows. They used to scare him, and he would do his best to ignore and forget about them. He didn’t want to be gay or bisexual, didn’t know how he would handle it, didn’t want to fool around with men only to prove something. His attraction to women had always been clear, since he was a teenager, and he couldn’t be physically close to a pretty girl without feeling his whole body burn and his groin throb. Making out with Josie Lloyd in the back of his big sister’s car drove him crazy with the hunger for more, and he would think about her naked, the shape and softness of her breasts, when he lay in bed at night and jacked off. But how he felt about the men he was friends with, what he wanted from them, was always hazy and elusive. Any potentially romantic feelings he had for men hinged on an emotional closeness that slipped through his fingers every time he tried to grasp it and had all but evaporated the moment he finished college. He didn’t know how to even begin to create a close friendship with another man as an adult, so he threw himself into his romances with women instead, hoping he’d get married one day and never want for anything else.

Since horseback riding on the Barbee Ranch, Sam and Montgomery have seen each other a few more times, each meeting lasting for hours. They talk, but whenever Sam tries to think of what he knows about the other man, he doesn’t come up with much. The more time they spend together, the more Sam likes him, and he can’t explain why. He has to remind himself not to be too eager for Montgomery’s attention. It doesn’t help he still can’t tell if Montgomery likes him back or if he’s simply tolerating Sam.

“Hey.” Lauren rises out of the chair and steps along the foot of the bed; she turns to face Sam. “Do you want me to leave, or should I take off this robe again?”

She arches one slender eyebrow, holding back a smile.

Sam peers at her and decides not to mention Montgomery. “You know. We’re allowed to hang out with our clothes on, even though we aren’t dating.”

Now, she does smile. “I know.”

“I don’t want you to go.”

“Okay.”

“Want to see if there’s anything on TV?”

“You got any cold beer?”

Sam nods.

Lauren turns to where she left her clothes strewn on the floor. She drops her robe, her backside to him. Peeks over her shoulder for a second, eyes coy.

He watches her get dressed.