fifty

I took Jay out for a tennis-ball game. We’d been in the backyard for about five minutes when Jay ran to the fence and stood up against it. He barked once, a greeting, and our jolly new neighbor, Phil Martin, yelled, “Shut up!”

“Jay, come,” I said, forcing my voice to be calm as I walked toward the fence. My dog met me, fell into heel position, and sat at my side when I stopped. “Hello.”

“I hate barking dogs,” said Martin, forgoing all semblance of neighborliness.

“I wouldn’t call him a ‘barking dog,’” I said. “He was just saying hello.” As if someone had planned the timing, the Washingtons’ spaniels, Flo, Mary, and Ross, exploded out their back door and ran in full cry to the fence on the other side of Phil Martin’s yard. “Now those are barking dogs” I said, and laughed. “But they’re never out for long, and I think if they get to know you, they’ll settle down.”

A cross between a harumph and an obscenity came out of Martin’s mouth before he turned his back and started to walk away. Maybe it was the stress of the morning, of wondering whether another person I knew had died a violent death, of learning that a sweet and gentle animal was gone and that her absence left a hole in someone’s heart. Maybe it was just the belligerent rudeness of the man. Whatever it was, it set me off.

“You know, Mr. Martin, we’re going to be neighbors for the foreseeable future.” He stopped, but kept his back to me. “I’ve been nothing but friendly to you, and my animals are healthy and well-trained, and they are definitely not a neighborhood nuisance.” He turned slowly, and I waited until we made eye contact. “So whatever it is you sat on, I suggest you have it removed.”

I waited for him to respond, and when he didn’t, I said, “Have a lovely afternoon,” and walked to my back door with Jay at my side. I stopped at the kitchen table and ripped up a couple of pieces of junk mail, muttering a few choice comments about Councilman Phil Martin. From there I went straight to the couch and stretched out. Jay hopped onto the other end, wrapped a paw over my calf, and laid his chin next to it.

I closed my eyes and tried again to sort through the tangled threads of information I’d taken in over the past few days. What little I had known about Summer and Evan seemed to be all wrong, an elaborate fiction they had spun for local consumption. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the bulk of the falsehoods were Summer’s creations—the forged Purdue diploma, her nonexistent marriage, her adopted name—but Evan had gone along with them. Ray was even more of an enigma, but since I hadn’t known him other than to say hello and pet his dog, the mystery of his past didn’t feel like such a betrayal.

Something landed on my belly. “Leo mio,” I said, stroking Leo’s soft tawniness as he settled his torso against mine. A second presence hopped onto the arm of the couch next to my shoulder and purred into my ear. “Miss Pixel.” She maneuvered herself between Leo and the back of the couch, quiet for once. I closed my eyes again, calmed by the touch of animals I loved.

But my mind kept working, and the more I thought about it, the more I was sure that Evan didn’t know the whole story, either. In fact, I was pretty sure he’d been played. But why? If Summer wanted to leave Reno, why not just leave? Why hook up with a stranger in a diner? And what about Ray? Evan had said it was a coincidence that Ray and Summer were both from Nevada, but that just didn’t ring true. Besides, Nevada wasn’t the only thing they had in common. They both knew sheep, and herding dogs. Weirder yet, neither one seemed to have any traceable history.

The phone rang in the kitchen. Only a handful of people ever use that number anymore—my mom, my brother, Giselle, Goldie, and an occasional telemarketer. I pulled my cell phone from my pocket and found it was dead. I’d forgotten to charge it. I slid Pixel between me and the back of the couch, extricated my legs from under Jay, swung myself into a sitting position, set Leo onto the couch beside Jay, and got up. Giselle had hung up by the time I reached the kitchen. I called her back.

“Oh, Janet, I just called you.”

“I know. I was trapped under a pile of animals.”

“I found something.” She sounded a bit breathless. “About Ray. At least I think it’s him.” Giselle didn’t want to tell me the rest on the phone and asked if she could come over on her way to class.

“I’ll do you one better,” I said. “I need dog food, so why don’t we meet at the Firefly?” It was one of my favorite coffeehouses, and was close to the university and my dog-food source. We agreed to meet in an hour, which gave me just enough time to change out of my Hugo-besmeared duds and drop seventy-four bucks on the kind people at Blackford’s Farm and Garden for a forty-pound bag of grain-free premium dog food. I had to rearrange a few things, including a new planter and two medium bags of potting soil that had been waiting for a couple of days, before the bag would fit behind my dog crates.

Somewhere I had read that switching a ring from the customary hand to the other can be a useful reminder, an updated version of tying a string around a finger, so as I walked into Firefly, I switch my silver-and-turquoise band from right to left to remind me to get the dog food, planter, and dirt out of the van when I got home. I settled in at a quiet table toward the back of the café. I had just turned my laptop on when a loud male voice from behind me exploded over the usual coffeehouse background murmur. It was followed by another, and the echo around it said the second guy was on speaker phone. I tried to ignore the conversation, but after about three minutes I knew it was impossible. A quick look around the room showed other people scowling and shooting eye-darts at the guy with the phone.

“Excuse me.” I had stood and turned toward the guy. He wore a wrinkled blue suit and his maroon tie had a dark stain four inches beneath the knot.

The guy said, “Hang on a sec,” and frowned at me.

I smiled and said, “That’s really distracting. Would you mind turning the speaker off and lowering your voice a little?”

“Look, lady, I’m making a multi-million-dollar deal here, so get a grip.”

A young woman at another table looked at me wide-eyed, and I decided it was time to set an example for the next generation. Besides, to quote Woodrow Call in Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, “I can’t abide rude behavior in a man.” I stepped up as close as possible to where the guy’s phone lay on the table, leaned toward it, and said, “Sir, does whoever is on the other end of that call know that you’re broadcasting it in a crowded coffeehouse?”

The guy grabbed the phone and covered the microphone. “Look, lady, just stick it.”

And that was the funniest thing I’d heard in quite a while. I laughed. I looked around, still laughing, and said, “Folks, does this guy’s conversation bother you?” Several affirmatives, many nods. “Me too. So I asked him to please turn it down and he told me to stick it.” I looked back at the guy, whose face had gone fire-engine red. Around me I heard, “Take it outside, guy,” and “Freakin’ annoying,” and a few things more forceful than “stick it.”

The guy grabbed his stuff and passed Giselle in the doorway as she came through. She stopped and placed an order, and ten seconds later she sat down. She was practically vibrating.

“You sure you need coffee?”

“I ordered tea. Herbal.” She plunked her purse onto a third chair. It tipped and emptied half its contents, and I marveled at how organized everything still was. If that had been my bag, coins and pens and a ratty tennis ball would have been scattered among miscellaneous bits of paper, my unsnapped billfold, and desiccated-liver dog treats. Giselle’s stuff was all neatly arranged in see-through zippered bags and they dropped more or less together next to the chair’s leg. She put them back in the purse, zipped it shut, and said, “Man, I’m so disorganized these days.”

“Please, Giselle. You’ll give us organizationally challenged a bad name.” I turned my laptop so she would have a better view just as the barista called our names. By the time I sat back down, Giselle had re-entered the search terms that pulled up the information she wanted to share—Ray + Reno + sheep + police. “There,” she said, pointing at the third entry, a link to a social media post that began “Have you seen this couple?” Giselle clicked the link and we landed on the original post.

Have you seen this couple around Reno? Theyre con artists. I need 2 find them SOON & get my money back. IM me if you have info.

A grainy picture of a man and a woman appeared above the post. The resolution was so low that it was impossible to make out details, but the man looked vaguely like Ray Turnbull. The woman wore a scarf and sunglasses, and had the collar of her coat pulled up past her jaw line. A band of dark hair peeked out between her forehead and scarf.

“Can you fix that picture somehow?” Giselle asked.

“I doubt it. It was probably taken with a cell phone on low res.” Giselle’s sigh echoed my own disappointment. “What about the comments? Anything interesting there?”

“Maybe.” She scrolled past the first few comments and pointed to one. “He mentions their names.”

Who knows theyre real names. He went by Ramon Torres. Claimed to have a ranch near Ely. Complete BULL! He said her name was Bella Verano.

Giselle tapped a nail against the screen. “Ramon Torres. Ray Turnbull. Torres means ‘towers’ in Spanish, but it sounds like toro. Bull. And Ramon is Raymond.”

A little tingle started in my brain.

“And bella verano is ‘beautiful summer,’ assuming the guy misspelled bella.”

These two had to be the people we knew as Ray Turnbull and Summer Winslow. “I think you found them,” I said, touching Giselle’s arm. “We—you—need to tell Hutchinson. If he goes back to the police in Reno with these names, who knows?”

“Right!” Giselle was bouncing in her chair and her face was flushed.

Finding the clue was exciting, but if Ray and Summer were running con games together in Reno and came here separately on the run, something had obviously gone wrong. And now Ray was dead, and Summer was missing, either running again, or … The pieces of the puzzle were swirling around my brain like leaves in an April wind, but one thing seemed clear. They had conned the wrong person.