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The Price Of Silence
Kate Wilhelm


In dire need of a job, Todd Fielding accepts the offer to work at The Brindle Times–even if she has to move to the lackluster town of Brindle.As she settles into her new home, Todd is fully prepared to adapt to the boredom of small-town life, but her preconceptions of Brindle are completely shattered when a local girl disappears. Even more shocking to Todd is the town's sheer indifference to the incident. No one–not even the police–appears particularly concerned.When Todd looks deeper into the story, she discovers that five other girls have "run away" from Brindle under strange circumstances over the past twenty years. As she sets out to uncover the history of a town that has cloaked itself in secrecy for far too long, evidence of manipulation and cold-blooded murder begin to unravel. And Todd may be the next victim to pay the deadly price of silence.






Praise for the novels of

KATE WILHELM


“Wilhelm claims a leading place in the ranks of trial suspense writers.”

—Publishers Weekly

“The smoothest mystery novel to come along in quite a while.”

—Associated Press on Clear and Convincing Proof

“As always, genre veteran Wilhelm creates a thought-provoking, complex plot that will keep readers interested.”

—Booklist on The Unbidden Truth

“Her carefully crafted approach to the legal thriller continues to separate Wilhelm from the competition.”

—Publishers Weekly on No Defense

“Sensitive, thought-provoking, and involving, Death Qualified is an unqualified success.”

—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Wilhelm is a masterful storyteller whose novels have just the right blend of solid plot, compelling mystery, and great courtroom drama.”

—Library Journal

“Brilliantly plotted, lyrically written, alluring and magical…Wilhelm’s story is a wrenching masterpiece about love, loyalty, and lies.”

—Booklist on The Good Children

“Engrossing plot twists…”

—Publishers Weekly on Clear and Convincing Proof




KATE WILHELM

The Price of Silence









The Price of Silence




Contents


Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two




Prologue


The Bend News, July, 1888

Four people perished in a fire that destroyed the Warden House last week in the town of Brindle. Dead in the fire were Mrs. Michael Hilliard, Mr. Joe Warden, the original founder of the historic inn, Mr. Harold Ivers, a traveling salesman, and Miss Dorothy Conway, an employee at the inn. Surviving the blaze was Mr. Michael Hilliard, and Daniel Warden, aged eight. The cause of the fire is unknown.

The fire bell woke me up that night. I ran to Ma’s room, but they weren’t there, and I ran outside. Ma was in the street, and across the way I could see the fire. The flames were shooting up high, with great showers of sparks. People were running everywhere, dipping water from the creek, throwing it on, other people were screaming and yelling. Horses were going crazy, plunging into the creek, up the other side. I stood next to Ma and she put her arm around my shoulders and held me tight. I wanted to get nearer, but she wouldn’t let me go.

The roof crashed down and made a geyser of ashes and sparks. The smell was terrible and the smoke made my eyes tear and I felt I was choking. Mostly I remember how afraid I was.

Pa came and when he saw me, he told me to get back in bed. He sounded mad and I ran back in and got in bed. But in a little while I got up again and listened to what they were saying. Pa said Brother McNulty would keep Daniel Warden with him, raise him with his own children. But Joe Warden, Janey, one of the girls and a traveling man had been in the building. “Gone,” he said. “God’s judgment, His punishment.”

I ran back to bed before they saw me. I knew Pa would give me a whipping if he found me up again. And I thought about Janey and another girl burning up. I had never heard of Janey, and I hadn’t known another girl lived right there in that house.

The next day Ma kept me in the kitchen with her most of the time. Because of the revival, and Reverend McNulty and his family, we were feeding a lot of people every day, and I peeled potatoes until I thought my fingers would fall off. It was so hot with the fire in the stove all day, my hair was sticking to my head, and my skirt sticking to my legs. I asked Ma who Janey was and she pinched my arm and said I must never mention that name again.

After we ate dinner and washed the dishes there was the tent revival and Reverend McNulty talked about sinful women and hellfire and brimstone. He was red-faced and yelled a lot, gesturing while he preached. He scared me. And it was so hot in the tent, it was like we were getting a taste of hellfire.

The day of the funeral everyone from town went, and folks came in from the countryside and even Bend. Pa talked about Joe Warden first, then Reverend McNulty talked a long time and Pa said a long prayer. Men lowered the coffin all the way and Pa threw in a handful of dirt and said, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

No one had much to say over the traveling man, just things like God rest his soul.

I thought they’d go on to the other two graves already dug, but Pa told me to get back in the wagon. I waited until he went to talk to somebody else and asked Ma if they were going to bury Janey and the other girl, and she pinched my arm harder than she ever did before. She said, “I told you never to say that name. Now get yourself to the wagon and wait.”

I climbed up in the back of the wagon and waited a long time. A hot wind kept blowing grit and dust everywhere, and there wasn’t any shade. Just the dry dirt and sage and rocks. I was itchy all over and so dried out I couldn’t have cried even if I’d wanted to. Since Pa was the regular preacher, it always seemed like everyone wanted a word with him, and we were almost the last ones to leave. The horse had just started to walk when I saw Mr. Hilliard standing by one of the other open graves. The men brought the coffin and put it in and began to shovel dirt on top. Mr. Hilliard just stood there. I don’t think anyone said a thing. At least no preacher said anything.

At first I thought Mr. Hilliard looked funny in his long black coat and a stovepipe hat, but then I felt sorry for him because he looked lonesome all by himself by the men shoveling dirt. I didn’t know whose grave was being filled in.

Our house was crowded again all afternoon until dinner time, and then there was the revival in the tent that was like an oven. I was glad enough to get to bed that night, and Ma said she was ready to drop.

But I woke up again, freezing cold. All the feather beds were put away for the summer and I went to ask Ma for a cover, but they weren’t in their bed, and I heard Pa’s voice in the sitting room. They were on their knees and he was praying about God’s judgment, but Ma was crying. She had on her robe with a blanket around her, but she was shivering and crying, and I started to cry too. I ran to Ma and she pulled me under the blanket with her. She was shaking all over and I was, too. I never had been so cold in my life, even in the winter, and I thought we were dying.

I must have cried myself to sleep, sitting on the floor with Ma, wrapped in the blanket. When I woke up again, I was in bed and it was already hot.

I didn’t get an answer to my question about Janey until I was a grown woman and married. My friend Eliza whispered that Janey had been married to Mr. Hilliard, but she was one of the bad girls at that House, and she either drowned her own baby, or else she was with a man when the baby wandered out to the creek and fell in.

I can’t remember that anyone ever said her name out loud, and I know I never did after that.

This is what I remember about the fire and the days after. Annabelle Bolton. November 5, 1943.




One


Todd drove into the parking lot behind her town-house apartment building that sweltering afternoon in August and braced herself for the next few minutes. She knew Barney was already home; she had spotted his truck parked back in the separate section reserved for oversize vehicles. He would greet her, hope lightening his face, and she would shake her head. Then he would try to cheer her up. They spent a great deal of time trying to cheer each other up these days, and that was about as futile as her going out for yet another job interview.

Overqualified, today’s idiot had said; they could start her at nine dollars an hour at best. But, he had added with the perfected personnel director’s smile she had come to loathe, they would keep her résumé on file for a possible future opening.

She pulled away from the back of the seat, where her blouse was plastered to the leather. Neither of them was using air-conditioning, not in the car and truck, not in the apartment. Trudging up the flight of stairs to their apartment, she drew in a deep breath and straightened her back, ready to smile and wave away the disappointing interview as inconsequential, just like the others.

The apartment was as hot as outside, the only sound was that of a whirring fan. She took off her shoes and, carrying them, walked to the door of the second bedroom, Barney’s studio. He had fallen asleep in a chair, his notebook and pen on the floor, a book on his chest. With his curly hair stuck to his forehead with sweat, he looked like a little boy worn out from softball practice.

“It isn’t fair,” she whispered, backing away from the door. Barney had worked his way through college, taking summer jobs, odd jobs, whatever he could find, and now, with his dissertation to write in the next two years, they were two weeks away from real desperation. In two weeks her unemployment would run out, and they couldn’t survive on Barney’s job in a book distributor’s warehouse—exhausting work that paid very little and left him too tired to work on the dissertation when he came home.

It wasn’t fair, she thought again, as she went through the spacious and beautiful apartment to the master bedroom. There were scant furnishings, not because they had been unwilling or unable to buy furniture, but because neither of them had wanted to take the time to shop. A bed, a chest of drawers, a few other pieces from Goodwill that they had bought when they first married three years earlier. Now she was more than grateful that they were such poor shoppers. What few new pieces they had acquired had gone on credit cards—an overpriced sofa, a good chair, Barney’s desk…. She could admit that they had been like kids in a candy store with a dollar to spend, buying on impulse with no thought of tomorrow.

When they rented the town house, sixteen months earlier, they had given little heed to the price. Her job had paid too well to consider cost. They had bought her Acura and his truck, and now owed more on both than they could realize by selling them. In February her company had been taken over, and she had not worked since.

But they had a great view of Mount Hood, she thought, eyeing it out the bedroom window as she stripped off her sodden interview clothes, and put on shorts and a tank top. Silent with feet bare, she wandered out to the kitchen to make iced tea. Barney had brought in the mail and she glanced at it listlessly as she waited for the water to boil. Bills, pleas for money, offers for credit cards…She picked up an envelope addressed to G. Todd Fielding, the name she used on her résumés, and frowned at the return address: The Brindle Times. From Brindle, Oregon.

“Where the hell is Brindle, Oregon?” she muttered, opening the envelope. She had sent her last résumé to a box number. She sat down at the kitchen table and read the enclosed letter, then read it again.

“The person we are looking for must have editorial skills, computer skills, and the ability to lay out a newspaper as well as periodicals. From your résumé and the journal you submitted it appears that you have the necessary skills. You would have to relocate, however. If you are interested, call any afternoon and we can arrange for a telephone interview.”

The letter practically quoted her own résumé, she thought in wonder. That was exactly the kind of work she had done for nearly three years. Her hand was shaking as she reached for the telephone, but she drew back. Where the hell was Brindle?

She located the town on the state road map, and had to fight back tears. On the other side of the mountains, south of Bend. Barney had to teach two classes during the coming year. It was bad enough to have to drive from Portland to Corvallis, as he had been doing this past year, but across the mountains?

She finished making tea, then sat and read the letter one more time. It was her job, she thought, exactly right for her, made to order for her.

She considered the alternatives. She could not support them on the kind of money she had been offered in her job search. If Barney had to work even part-time while teaching his classes, he would not be able to finish the dissertation in the next two years. His adviser would retire, and, university politics being what they were, he might be stranded.

They had already cut frills, everything that could be cut, and were still left with car payments, student loans, health insurance, rent, utilities, food. They could not afford the town house, but neither could they afford to move with first and last months’ rent payable in advance, plus a cleaning deposit. She knew to the penny how much they had to have each month, and even if both of them worked at entry-level jobs they probably couldn’t make it.

All right, she thought angrily, don’t go down that road again. She had traveled it so often, she could do it sound asleep, and frequently did. No more recriminations about past stupidity, she and Barney had agreed, think alternatives instead.

If Barney could arrange his two classes for consecutive days, go over one day, come back the next…One long commute a week…He could stay in a motel one night a week…Have the rest of the week free…What he needed was access to a library—their apartment was crammed with the library books he needed for his research—and time. A lot of time without exhaustion from menial labor and, more important, without worry about money.

She picked up the letter and went to the bedroom, closed the door softly, then sat on the edge of the bed and dialed.



In the office of The Brindle Times, Johnny Colonna was glaring at his mother, who was holding the weekly edition of the newspaper and shaking it furiously.

“It’s a shambles, a mess, a loathsome unholy mess!” she said again. “I won’t have it, Johnny. I’m telling you, I won’t have it! I’ll shut down before I let a mess like this go out again!”

He looked relieved when the phone rang. “Yes,” he snapped. “Who?” He held his hand over the mouthpiece. “It’s that woman, Fielding, the one who sent her résumé last week.”

“Tell her we’ll call back in five minutes. And I’ll do the talking.”

He repeated the message and hung up. “Mother, I thought we decided on Stan Beacham. Why bother talking to this one?”

“I haven’t decided on anyone,” she said. “That man’s a twit. He’d stay just as long as it took to find something better. And he doesn’t know any more about computers than you do. I’ll get her résumé and make the call in here.”

Ignoring the sullen look that crossed her son’s face, Ruth Ann marched from his office, crossed the outer office to her own and picked up Todd Fielding’s folder. None of the three women in the outer office dared glance at her on her first trip across their space, nor on her return. When Ruth Ann was in a snit, it was best to look very busy.

Ruth Ann was eighty, and from the time of her father’s death when she was twenty-one, she had published, edited and, for much of the time, written every word in the newspaper. And, she had decided that morning, reading the latest edition, she would be damned if she would see it become a piece of crap. Crap, she repeated to herself. That was what it was turning into. Ungrammatical, words misspelled, one story cut off in midsection, strings of gibberish…Crap!

She placed the call herself, seated at Johnny’s desk, while he took up a stance of martyrdom at the window. He blamed it all on the computer system he had installed the previous year. They would get the hang of it, he had said more than once. It just took time. Everyone knew it took time. Well, time had just run out, she thought as Todd Fielding answered the phone on the first ring.

“Ms. Fielding, my name is Ruth Ann Colonna and I’m the publisher of The Brindle Times. I was quite impressed by your résumé. And by the quality of the trade journal you provided. I have to tell you up front that we could not pay you the kind of salary you were receiving previously, however there is a house available rent-free through another party, therefore not to be considered part of your pay package. You would be responsible for property taxes and insurance, roughly a thousand or a little more annually. We offer excellent health benefits.”

Ruth Ann watched Johnny stiffen, wheel about and shake his head. She ignored him. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about the journal,” she said.



It was a long interview. Ruth Ann asked questions, and Todd answered in a straightforward way. When Ruth Ann asked what Barney’s dissertation was, Todd said, “The Cultural, Political and Religious Movements that Account for the Fluctuations in the Ascendancy of Rationalistic Belief Systems.”

Ruth Ann laughed. “My God! That’s a mouthful. A philosopher, for goodness sake! I didn’t know anyone studied philosophy these days.”

When Ruth Ann finally hung up, she regarded Johnny thoughtfully. “She’ll do,” she said.

“Mother, be reasonable. You can’t hire someone you never even met on the basis of a phone call. And whose house are you offering a stranger?”

“As for the first part, I believe I just did,” Ruth Ann said. “And the house is Mattie and Hal Tilden’s. Mattie begged me to put someone in it. Their insurance has quadrupled since it’s been empty, and she knows an empty house invites trouble. But you’re right about strangers. The Fieldings will come over on Friday to meet in person. And, Johnny, I suppose you haven’t even glanced at that journal, or paid much attention to her résumé. I suggest you look them over carefully. She’s had art training, and studied all sorts of computer technology, software and hardware, whatever that means. You don’t know a pixel from a pixie, and neither do I, but she does. She can edit, and she’s a good writer. She has excellent recommendations. If you take the press in the direction you’re thinking of, you’ll need someone just like her.”

She walked to the door, paused and said, “I want to see every word, every paragraph, every ad on paper before you go to press next week. Every goddamn word.”



In her bedroom Todd disconnected and carefully put the phone down on the bed. She stood up, flung her hands in the air and screamed a Tarzan yell of triumph, then raced from the room, only to meet Barney in the hall. He looked sleep-dazed and bewildered.

“What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“It’s going to work! I’ve got a job! Oh, God, you’re wearing too many clothes!” She began to pull at his shirt. “We need to celebrate! Right now!” Giving up on his shirt, she yanked off her tank top, and started to wriggle out of her shorts.




Two


On Thursday morning Todd sat cross-legged on the floor, both arms crossed over her breasts, fingers crossed on both hands. When Barney glanced at her as he started to dial, she crossed her eyes.

Sputtering with laughter, he hit the disconnect button. “Stop that!”

“Can’t. This is how I work magic.”

He turned his back and dialed Victor Franz’s number. Victor was his adviser, his mentor, a father substitute who treated Barney like a protégé.

She listened to him explain the situation, and then could make no sense of his monosyllabic end of the conversation. “Yes…. No…. Sounds good…. No problem….”

He hung up and turned around to her, his eyes shining. “You’re a witch,” he said. “Classes on Thursdays and Fridays. He’ll arrange it. And no motel. He said I should plan to use one of his kids’ rooms.”

Victor’s three children were all grown and gone, and he and his wife were keeping a big farmhouse with several acres of apple trees until he retired in two years. They also had two big, shaggy Australian shepherd dogs and numerous cats.

“But there’s a catch,” Barney said, pulling Todd to her feet. “Once a month I have to stay over until Sunday while he and Ginny go to the coast to visit her folks. I have to dog-sit, cat-sit and house-sit.”

“Oh no!” she cried in mock dismay. “And have his library at your disposal! Merciless man!”

Barney laughed and drew her closer, biting her ear not at all gently. “Witch! I think we need to celebrate again.”



They were both subdued when they approached Brindle on Friday. The Great Basin desert stretched out to infinity on one side of the highway, and the Cascades loomed on the other. One looked as dead as a lunar landscape, the other, thinly populated here with ponderosa pines, was as unmoving as a painting. The only signs of life were the cars and trucks on the road.

“You’ll be bored to death out here,” Barney said.

“Won’t. I’ll take up bird-watching. I wonder if there are birds? But you’ll be miserable.”

“Nope. I’ll wander barefoot in the desert, grow a long beard, have visions and become a revered prophet.”

“We are arriving,” she said a moment later. On the left, a mammoth greenhouse seemed ridiculously out of place considering that the temperature was 101. A motel, a gas station with a small convenience store attached, a Safeway…Another store, general merchandise, a tourist-type souvenir store, another motel with a café, a rock shop…It looked like a movie set waiting for the actors. Behind one of the gas stations, a group of manufactured homes stood baking in the sun.

“We turn right on First Street,” she said. It came up fast and Barney made the turn. Now a larger building came into view, a two-story hotel, with a lot of well-maintained greenery visible, and a few more shops. “Right again on Spruce,” she said. Brindle had turned into a real village with houses and yards, green things growing, a restaurant, a few people going on about their business. She spotted the Bolton Building with a neat sign: The Brindle Times, and Barney pulled to the curb and parked.

“Ready or not,” he murmured, and patted her thigh. “Just don’t go into your magic pose. Okay?”

“I’ll try to restrain myself,” she said, uncrossing her fingers.

She had told Ruth Ann Colonna that they would arrive between one and two, and it was ten minutes after one when they entered the building. A pretty, round-faced young woman met them.

“Mrs. Fielding? They’re expecting you. I’ll tell Johnny you’re here. Just a sec.” She was wearing jeans, a T-shirt and sandals. She crossed the outer office, tapped on a door, then entered another room. Two other women looked them over as they waited, an older woman, possibly in her sixties, and a lean young Latina.

The door across the room opened and the one who had met them reappeared, followed closely by a thick-set man with straight black hair. He had a dark tan and big brown eyes.

“Ms. Fielding? Mr. Fielding? Johnny Colonna. Glad to meet you. Come in, come in.” He clasped her hand briefly, nodded to Barney and led the way into his office, where he introduced Ruth Ann.

Todd had assumed that Mrs. Colonna was his wife, and was surprised to meet the old woman. She was taller than Todd and as straight as a stick, without a hint of extra fat; her skin was weathered and wrinkled with a tan as dark as her son’s, and her hair pure white and straight, cut short. Her eyes were startling, green with flecks of amber. She looked sinewy, tough, impervious to the elements. She was wearing faded chinos and a cotton shirt.

Todd was beginning to feel overdressed in her interview clothes—skirt, blouse, panty hose.

Waving Todd and Barney to chairs, Johnny went behind his desk to his own chair, cleared his throat, and then said, “I was impressed by the journal you sent us, but I’m afraid that we’re not doing anything quite like that. We have a weekly newspaper, and a few circulars, nothing like you’re used to working with.”

Without glancing at him, Ruth Ann handed Todd a copy of the latest edition of the newspaper, the one that had infuriated her. “Can you tell by looking it over what went wrong? Theodore, our editor, swears that he edited the copy himself, and he’s been quite good in the past. And I know beyond any doubt that my own editorial was letter perfect.” She sat in a chair close to Todd’s.

As Todd began to examine the newspaper, Ruth Ann turned to Barney. “Do you have computer expertise also, Mr. Fielding?”

Barney shook his head. “Not a bit. I use a word processor and when I goof, as I do all the time, she fixes it.” He nodded at Todd, who was frowning at the newspaper.

She turned to the last page, then looked at Ruth Ann. “It’s lost the formatting. And the columns aren’t set. Also, someone tried to use text and graphic boxes without setting the parameters.” She would have continued, but Ruth Ann held up her hand.

“If I edited all the paper copy and someone put it in the computer, would it end up garbled like that?”

“Until the program is straightened out, the errors fixed, the formatting reset, things like that, it would probably come out about like this.”

Ruth Ann’s lips tightened. “What are those strings of gibberish?” She leaned over and pointed to a string of codes.

“It looks like different programs were used and codes from one ended up in the text without being translated.”

“Ms. Fielding—may I call you Todd? How long would it take you to straighten out the programs, fix things, print a decent edition if you had the copy?”

Johnny made a throat-clearing sound and Ruth Ann turned to snap at him, “Have you understood a word she’s said?”

“You know I don’t know anything about computers.”

“And neither does anyone else in this office. That’s the problem.” She looked at Todd again.

“I could run off an edition in a day or two if I had all the prepared copy. But it would be makeshift. To fix things the way they should be fixed? I can’t be sure until I know what programs are in use, how many people have access to them, if there are templates, or if they have to be set up. It could be a matter of days, or it could take several weeks. And after all that, your people, anyone who uses the programs, should be trained. I can’t say without more information.”

“When can you start?”

“I thought you said you would want someone by the first of September,” Todd said.

“I want someone now, today, Monday. Todd, if you can start sooner, I would appreciate it. We will cover your relocation expenses, hire movers to come in and pack your things, haul them down here. Meanwhile you could stay in the hotel, Warden House. Would that be acceptable?”

Startled, Todd glanced at Barney. He nodded at her and stood up, then said, “Mrs. Colonna, I think Todd and I should take a few minutes to talk about this.”

“Yes, you should,” she said. “Come along. I’ll take you to my office.” She led the way back through the outer office to the opposite side and opened a door. “My room,” she said. “This is where you’ll be working, Todd, at least until Theodore leaves in September. When you’re ready, just come back to Johnny’s office. Take as long as you like.” She looked around, shrugged, then left, closing the door after her.

It was a bigger office than Johnny’s, and while his had been neat and tidy, this room was cluttered—an old desk, two old chairs, boxes on the floor, papers all over the desktop. A separate desk held only a computer.

“Barney, we can’t just abandon our stuff,” Todd said.

“Honey, that old lady is desperate,” he said softly. He looked at the vintage desk, faded framed photographs on the wall, wooden file cabinets. “This is her baby,” he said. “She has to save it, and she can see a savior in you. We won’t abandon anything. I’ll take care of stuff in Portland and you can go to work. Do you want to start right away? That’s the only question.”

She crossed the office to a tall window with venetian blinds, wooden blinds. She hadn’t seen blinds like that since…Never, she realized. She had never seen blinds like that. Barney had pegged Ruth Ann Colonna exactly right, she thought then. She had been considering the work aspect of the interview, but he had seen through that to the person who had not actually pleaded with her to start, but had come close.



In Johnny’s office again, Ruth Ann sat down and said, “We have to do something now. We can’t afford another issue like that one. How many complaints have you fielded so far?”

He rubbed his eyes. “Plenty. I know we do. It’s just the expense with money so tight.”

“How many times have you brought in a consultant this past year? At fifty dollars an hour. They come in, spend three or four hours fixing things and for a week or two everything seems to work and then it turns into garbage again. We have to have someone in house to keep things working right and to train everyone here.”

“I’m not fighting you,” he said, holding out both hands in a placating gesture. “See. I agree. But, Lord, they look like kids, both of them.”

“They are kids,” she said. “Pretty, precocious children who understand the world they’re inheriting, which is more than I can say for myself. All right. I’ll take them over to the Tilden house and leave the key with them, and afterward I have to go see Louise. And, Johnny, see to it that Shinny behaves himself. She’s to be the editor in charge and he has to accept that.”

Lou Shinizer called himself a reporter; she called him many things but never that. In her opinion he was incapable of writing a yard-sale sign, and in fact he did little more than run around and pick up handouts from various sources, but someone had to do it. He fancied himself a ladies’ man. She was certain Todd would swat him down fast. Shinny did not like to be swatted down.



That evening when Ruth Ann arrived home, she went straight to the kitchen to mix herself a tall glass of bourbon and ice water. Maria Bird was dicing onions, and she looked up as her husband Thomas Bird entered by the back door carrying a Jack Daniels’ carton.

“What’s that?” Maria asked.

At the same time Thomas Bird asked, “Where do you want me to put this?”

“With the others,” Ruth Ann said, sitting down at the kitchen table. “Papers,” she said to Maria. “And don’t ask what kind because I don’t know. Louise insisted that I stop by her house and pick up that stuff. She’s fading away, Maria.” Thomas Bird walked past them with the box.

“I know,” Maria said. “And she’s ready. But you have no business running around all day in this heat, or you’ll be in the same shape she’s in.”

Maria was five feet two inches tall, stocky, with lustrous black hair done up in intricate braids laced with red ribbons. She had come to help out when Johnny was born, a teenage girl fresh out of high school. Leone had called her “the little Indian girl.” He had left them all when Johnny was two, as if he had fulfilled his duty here and it was time to move on. Maria had stayed. A few years later, Maria had brought Thomas Bird in to introduce him, almost as if asking permission to marry him. He was not much taller than she was, and powerfully built. Ruth Ann had no illusions about who ran her household—they did. She had told them fifteen years earlier that she had named them in her will. They would get the house, Johnny would get the press. She had few if any secrets from Maria, and Maria, no doubt, shared everything she knew with Thomas Bird.

Sipping her drink while Maria prepared dinner, Ruth Ann told her about Todd and Barney. “Shaggy chestnut hair, big eyes like milk chocolate, and a brain. She’ll come back on Sunday and start on Monday and Barney will see to things in Portland and come along in a couple of weeks. He’s like a curly-haired boy, maybe a little younger than she is, or at least he looks younger. She’s twenty-eight. They loved the house, but it needs to be cleaned.”

Maria nodded; she would see to it.

“I reassured them,” Ruth Ann continued, “that the Tildens will likely be away for years.” Their daughter had been widowed by an accident that had left her partially paralyzed, and there were three young children. She knew the Tildens were not going to return to Brindle until the youngsters were grown. Ruth Ann sighed. One after another of her generation, leaving one way or another. Louise, whom she had gone to see in the nursing home, was eighty-eight, on her way out. She took another sip of her drink.

“Anyway, Louise insisted that I go over to the house and pick up that box. Deborah was supposed to bring it around weeks ago, but she’s been too busy and kept forgetting. If I’m going to write the history of Brindle I need that material, Louise said. Strange to be so lucid, and she is, and so weak. She’s entirely bedridden now.”

Maria tightened her lips. It didn’t pay to dwell on the natural order of things, she sometimes said, and didn’t repeat it now, but Ruth Ann got the message and did not continue. She would write Louise’s obit that weekend, have it ready. She would kill Lou Shinizer before she let him touch it.

From the kitchen table she could see that the sun had cleared the mountains, and shadows were forming out on the patio. She picked up her drink and walked to the door. “Can I do anything in here?” she asked. Maria said no, the way she always did. Ruth Ann went out to the patio and sat down again. The air had cooled rapidly as the sun moved on its westward track.

Seeing her old friend that day, knowing her end was so near, had stirred up too many memories, she mused. She had suddenly remembered with startling clarity the last time she had seen her father alive, sixty years ago. Stricken with pneumonia, he had struggled for breath under the oxygen tent they used in those days, only a few years before the penicillin that would have saved him. He had said something about the paper, or papers, save the paper…something. Today Louise had said almost the same thing: she had saved the papers.

After her father’s funeral, Ruth Ann had gone back to Eugene, to the women’s dorm to pack up her belongings and go home again, to take charge of the press, to save the paper. She had worked with her father from the time she was a child and knew exactly what had to be done, while her mother was totally ignorant of every aspect of it.

For years after that, she had lived with her mother in their little house on Spruce Street, two blocks from the Bolton Building that her father had built to house the newspaper. And then Leone had entered her life. She smiled faintly. She had been thirty-eight, in love for the first time, captivated by a pretty face and a charming accent. Leone had done two good things: fathered a child, and built the house Ruth Ann lived in now. A good house, he had said, a Mediterranean house, stucco, with a red tile roof, and wide overhangs to keep out the summer sun, let in the winter light, spacious rooms, this semi-enclosed patio. She took a longer drink. Leone had believed she was wealthy, she had come to realize, and when he learned that she wasn’t, he had pouted like a child. Johnny had his beautiful eyes and some of the same gestures, which she didn’t understand. He had no memory of his father, how could he have learned those gestures? One of those riddles jealously guarded by the genes. She finished her drink.

She brought her thoughts back to the question of papers. After her mother died, Ruth Ann had gone to Spruce Street to pack up the house, and she had found half a dozen boxes of papers that she had never known existed. Now she wondered if her father had told both of them to save the paper, or papers, and if her mother had done so without ever mentioning it. Ruth Ann had moved the boxes to one of the empty rooms and they were still there.




Three


Wednesday night, Todd was dreaming. The presses were running, newspapers shooting out like disks from toy guns, flying out randomly, falling in heaps here, there, everywhere. When she tried to catch one, it eluded her, and she ran around a cavernous room pulling switches, jabbing buttons, trying to stop the press gone wild. An arctic wind stirred the papers, blew them around in a blizzard that blinded her, threatened to smother her.

Abruptly she woke up, shivering uncontrollably, struggling with the sheet and thin coverlet on her bed. The room was freezing. Groping for the light switch, she sat up amid the tangle of bedding. She had turned off the air conditioner earlier and opened a window; now she wrapped the coverlet around her shoulders and crossed the room to close the window. She didn’t even have a heavy robe, not in August, she thought in disgust. The air-conditioner control was set to Off; she turned it to Heat, but the cold was penetrating, unrelenting. She went to the bathroom and turned on the hot water in the tub. When she looked in the mirror, she saw that her lips were pale, not quite blue, but close, and she couldn’t stop shaking. In the tub of hot water, gradually warming up, she decided she had to get out of this creepy hotel, go to the house that was to be her home for the next two years.

At first, she had been charmed by the hotel lobby, its vaulted ceiling, the intricate pattern of inlaid wood flooring, the marble counter at the registration desk, all turn-of-the-century elegance. But the suite she was in was not charming. Two small rooms that had seemed quaint, cozy and inviting had changed, become oppressive. Now this. Air-conditioning gone crazy, and no one to call at two-thirty in the morning.

She closed her eyes as the steam rose from the hot water. She wanted to be home with Barney, feel his warmth next to her, feel his arm over her, his legs pressing against hers. Realizing how close she was to tears, she shook her head angrily. Not her style. She missed him, and she was tired. That was all it amounted to, fatigue and loneliness.



Ruth Ann shivered and pulled the cover up higher, vaguely aware of Maria, who had entered her bedroom. Maria put an electric blanket over her and plugged it in, then sat in a nearby chair, wrapped in her own woolen blanket. Ruth Ann slid back into a dream-laden sleep. She was examining the newspaper with a screaming banner headline: Murder. She looked at the text, but it dissolved into a blank white space before she could focus on it. She turned the page; again the text melted into whiteness when she tried to read it. She could see pages of dense, crisp black text on white, but wherever she paused and tried to read, the text vanished. “I can’t see it, Dad,” she said plaintively.

“I didn’t have time to write it,” he said from somewhere behind her. When she turned to look at him, he vanished just as the print had done.

“Hush, Ruth Ann. Hush,” Maria whispered. “Go back to sleep now.”

Gradually the warmth of the blanket stilled her shaking, and she slipped deeper into sleep. When she woke up again, the electric blanket was gone and her room was pleasantly warm. She tried without success to recall her dreams, gave it up, and reflected instead on the miracle Todd had wrought. This week’s newspaper was fine, perfect, the way it should be, and she had told Todd to take the day off, to relax and get some rest, exactly what she herself intended to do. She felt as if she had run a marathon, which in a sense was what they had done over the past three days.



Todd checked out that morning, loaded her bags into the Acura, and then went to the newspaper to look over the computer programs. Once there, she stopped by Johnny’s office. His door was open and she tapped lightly and entered. He beamed at her.

“I thought you were taking the day off,” he said. “You deserve it.”

“I am. I just wanted to get an idea of what all was installed on the computer. It’s a real mess, jumbled with stuff you don’t need, and missing a few things that you do. You really should have a firewall and a better utilities program. I’m going to have to uninstall just about everything down to the operating system and then reinstall things. It would be best if I do that after office hours. If you have no objection I’ll network my laptop into the system, back up everything onto it, and do a lot of the work at home and try not to disrupt things here while I’m at it.”

He spread his hands. “Say no more. Todd, whatever it needs, do it. Blanket permission, no questions asked. Good enough?” He grinned at her. “Just don’t tell me about it.”

She laughed and turned away from the door, paused and said, “Good enough. Is this place locked up tight after hours?”

“I’ll get another key and drop it off at the hotel for you.”

She shook her head. “I’m moving into the Tilden house today. I have to see to the electricity and phone, transfer them to our name, things like that. I’ll drop by here later and pick up the key.”

Mildred, the round-faced woman who handled the classifieds, smiled broadly at Todd when she left Johnny’s doorway. “You’ve put him in the best mood he’s had in months,” Mildred said in a low voice. “Good job.”

Toni, the accountant, nodded and mouthed the same words: “Good job.”

Todd felt buoyed when she left the building and looked around. “Good job,” she repeated to herself, pleased with the praise, with her acceptance. “It really is going to work,” she said under her breath.

She took her time getting to her new home, winding in and out of the streets slowly. Back here, away from the highway, it was a pretty little town, with neat houses and yards, not a lot of greenery, but not desert, either. That changed as she drove north on one of the streets, where the houses ended and the desert took over. It was about another half mile to North Crest Loop; although the street had been finished all the way to it, building had stopped, and the continuation of the street was in poor repair. Scattered pine trees had achieved mature growth, and there was a lot of sage and rank grasses. It was like that on Juniper, her street, and apparently that way on all of them, as if the planners had anticipated development to continue north. Instead, it had moved south, on the other side of Brindle Creek, and east on the other side of the highway, leaving this end of town barren. There was a park along the creek front, a block wide, several blocks long with shade trees, picnic tables, a playground. Children were playing there now, a few women were on benches chatting.

Brindle, she had learned, had been named after the small stream that bisected the town. Joe Warden had ridden this far and stopped when his horse, a brindled mare, went lame. The stream, no more than ten feet across and shallow, flashed silver against black and brown lava, colored like his horse. He called it Brindle Creek, and years later, when the town was incorporated, the name stuck. There was a footbridge at the park, and she had heard there was another one up farther. She had not seen it yet.

It didn’t take long to explore the town. She headed for her house, repeated it under her breath, “Her house.” She loved it—the juniper paneling, polished plank floors, bay windows, fireplaces in two rooms…. But she had to buy opaque shades for the bedroom—Barney woke up if any light hit his eyes—and dishes, a few at least until their stuff was delivered, sheets to last until they got their own, a towel or two…. Wandering through the house, she made a list, and then headed for Bend, a discount store, the utility company, telephone company….

It was nearly five when she returned to the office, and very hot again. She was not sweating, to her surprise, and realized that the air was so arid that perspiration must evaporate as fast as it formed. She felt parched.

Johnny was chatting with another man in the outer office when she entered. “Todd,” Johnny said, smiling, “I was beginning to think you’d gotten lost in the great metropolis of Bend. Come meet our doctor. Sam Rawleigh, everyone’s doctor in these parts. Todd Fielding.”

Dr. Rawleigh was tall and very handsome, like a television personality or a movie actor. Dark wavy hair, touched with grey at the temples, regular features, even a square chin with a slight cleft. As a young man he must have been a knockout, she thought, shaking hands. Now, fifty-something, he was still one of the handsomest men she had ever met. His eyes were dark brown, eyebrows with enough of an arch to suggest flirtatiousness, and a tan that was so smooth and even it looked like a salon tan.

“Todd, I’ve been listening to your praises,” he said. “But no one mentioned that you are also beautiful. It’s a pleasure.”

She felt the heat rise on her cheeks. God, she thought, he must have to fight off his female patients with a baseball bat.

“We were on our way across the street for a drink,” Dr. Rawleigh said. “Join us.”

She started to shake her head, and he added, “What I prescribe for you is an iced double espresso. You look as if you’ve had quite a day in heat you haven’t yet become accustomed to.”

“Good heavens!” she said. “That sounds irresistible. Just like that, you talked me into it.”

“I’ll pick up that key for you,” Johnny said, and strolled back to his office.

They crossed the street and sat under an awning at Carl’s Café, where Todd could smell pine trees, desert and heat. She hadn’t realized heat had its own particular odor, but she was certain that was what she sniffed in the dry air. Both men ordered beer and she had her espresso, then sighed with contentment at her first sip. Just right.

“You didn’t like our hotel?” Dr. Rawleigh asked after taking a long drink.

“It isn’t that,” she said. “I want to get the house in order, get settled—but I have to admit that having the air conditioner go crazy in the middle of the night was not a real inducement to try another night there.”

“It wasn’t the air conditioner,” Johnny said. “We get a crazy inversion or something now and then and a blanket of cold air settles over the whole area, then dissipates after a time.”

“In August?”

“Any month. No one has really explained it, but it happens.”

“Have you felt the water in the creek?” Dr. Rawleigh asked. “It’s like ice water year round. Up at Warm Springs it comes out hot, here it’s ice water. The inversion is sort of like that—except that it’s air, not water. The volcanoes around here are strange, not like other mountains. That frigid air mass has been happening ever since I’ve been around, off and on, unpredictable. I was here for months before I experienced one. You’re here less than a week and there it is. Go figure.”

“Surely a meteorologist can explain it,” Todd said. “I never felt cold air like that before in my life.”

“We’ve had a couple come in,” Johnny said, “and nothing happens. They leave again thinking we’re all balmy. We’re okay. This land is what’s crazy.”

He laughed. “For a good look at our crazy land, some time after the weather cools a bit, you and your husband should take a day hike up to the creek head,” Dr. Rawleigh said. “Great view from up there. It’s a good hike, five or six miles up and back. Up Crest Loop to a narrow bridge, and take the left road, a dirt road. The Loop winds on around a while, past my place, and eventually back down to the highway, but the dirt road turns into a trail up a ways and eventually you’ll come to a big boulder, and gushing out from under it is where Brindle Creek begins. It isn’t a difficult hike, but watch out for rattlesnakes. They’re up there this time of year. Anyway, it’s dry as a bone above the boulder, nothing to indicate that it’s the source of pure ice water. You can fill your water bottles, perfectly safe up there. You don’t want to do that down farther, but it starts out absolutely pure. The creek comes tumbling down the terraces, through town, under the highway bridge, and on for another mile or two and then takes a dive. Gone.”

“What do you mean, gone? Gone where?”

“Underground. The Great Basin is jealous. No water that goes in ever gets out again. Just the way it is.”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Todd said. She finished her espresso and picked up her purse. “I have to be going. It’s nice meeting you, Dr. Rawleigh. Thanks for the prescription. It was exactly right.”

“Please,” he said. “Just Sam. The little kids call me Dr. Rawleigh because their moms make them, then it turns into Dr. Sam, and before you know it, just plain old Sam. We’re all on first names here, even us outsiders.”

“You’re an outsider?”

“Going on twenty-one years now. Came, married a local girl, stayed, but I’m an outsider. An observer. You get used to it.”

Although Johnny looked a little uncomfortable, he did not dispute the doctor’s words. He shrugged and waved to the waitress for the check, and Todd left them at the table, bemused. So far everyone had treated her exactly the way she would have expected, kindly, with friendliness, without a trace of suspicion or distrust.

That night she called Barney and told him about her day and he told her about his, then said huskily, “The movers will come on Tuesday, and the minute they’re out the door, so am I.”

Just as huskily she said, “Good. Then I will try to be patient and not run away with the handsome doctor.”

When she hung up, she closed her eyes tight and drew in a long breath. She had never been so lonesome in her life.




Four


“And on your left, is the one and only Coombs greenhouse where at this very moment an acre of tomatoes is getting sunburned, or sun dried, or something. The Coombs girls are both in their sixties.” Todd was the tour guide, pointing out the must-see sights to Barney as they strolled. They had been there a month, but this was the first weekend free of settling-in chores. “I have to take pictures at their mother’s funeral, at least at the cemetery, on Monday. Half the county will be there, according to Ruth Ann.” Sobering, she said. “Ruth Ann wrote a very touching obituary. She’s really a fine writer. Anyway, coming up on the right is Miss Lizzy’s gift shop, where you will find plates with the map of Oregon, Chief Joseph’s last stand, some of the loveliest carved or sculpted birds I’ve ever seen, a rendition of the Oregon Trail on bark—” She frowned at Barney, who had started to laugh.

“Sir, this is a serious business.”

“You’re babbling.”

“I know. You have to remember that as one of four children, and just a girl, no one ever paid any attention to anything I said, so I stopped saying much of anything until I found you—Oh, look. There’s Sam’s Explorer. He’s going into the rock shop. Come on, you can meet him. The owner is Jacko. No last name. Just Jacko.” She hurried him along.

During the past month, she had made it a point to enter every business establishment in town and introduce herself. Her cause, she had explained to Barney, was to be known so that if anything happened, someone would think to tell her. Also, she had said, Shinny, their star reporter, didn’t know the difference between a grocery list and a news story. So far the most compelling bit of news he had reported had been the town-council meeting; they were debating where on the highway to put a traffic light. North end of town, or at Crest Loop? The debate, she had added, had been raging for two years.

Jacko’s shop was a single room with aisles barely wide enough to maneuver in, crowded on both sides by bins of rocks, baskets of rocks, a long counter so cluttered with rocks there was never enough space to fill out a receipt, a showcase filled with cut and polished rocks, and another one with rocks that had been carved, inset into wooden frames, rested on black pedestals, or simply tumbled about. An agate-framed clock said nine fifteen, and always said nine fifteen, but its snowflake agate was beautiful. It was dark blue with white flecks that looked adrift throughout. In the rear of the shop was a workbench crowded with lapidary equipment.

When Todd and Barney entered the shop, Sam was leaning on the counter, where he and Jacko were examining something. Both men looked up.

“Hi,” Todd said. “This is Barney. My husband.” After the introductions, they all looked at a geode on the counter. The hollow rock was as big as a grapefruit, and had been cut into two pieces.

“I never saw one that big,” Todd said. “It’s awesome.” It was neatly halved, the cavity filled with glittering crystals of quartz streaked with pale blue. She looked at Jacko. “Is it for sale?”

“Ask him,” Jacko said, jerking his thumb at Sam. “He found it and sawed it open. He brings in stuff like that to rile me.” Jacko was short, no more than five feet five, and his head was totally bald, but he had a great beard with enough hair that if it had been amply divided between his pate and his chin there would have been hair left over.

Barney was examining the geode. “Wow, that is a beauty. How did you manage to saw it like that?”

Two big crystals had been split almost exactly in half, and the cut edges smoothed and polished to a mirror finish.

“Just luck,” Sam said. “No way of knowing what you’re going to find until you open one of them, and I happened to hit it right. I thought I’d have them made into bookends, juniper wood, curved like a wave breaking with these set in. If Thomas Bird will carve the stands, they’ll make a pretty pair.”

“A fantastic pair,” Barney said. “Where did you find it?”

Jacko snorted and Sam grinned, then said, “Does a fisherman tell where he caught the fifteen-pound trout? Out there.” He waved his hand generally toward the vast desert.

“You have equipment to cut rocks and polish them, all that?” Todd asked.

Jacko made his peculiar snort of laughter again. “He’s got stuff that makes mine look like a kid’s first tool kit.” He motioned to Todd to follow and started to move away, saying, “He had to build a special room to house his equipment. Look, I got some new crystals in last week.”

While she looked at the new crystals, Barney and Sam chatted about the desert and rock hounds. “It gets in the blood,” Sam said. “You always think that next time you’ll find something even better, or you find a streak and have to force yourself to leave it, hoping no one else will come along before you get back to it. Come up to the house sometime, let me show you my collection.”

Todd shook her head at Jacko. “I’m waiting for a clearance sale.” Turning to Sam she said, “We took that hike last weekend, up to the start of the creek. It’s beautiful up there. Thanks for telling me about it.” She glanced at her watch. “We should be going,” she said to Barney. They were on their way for a cookout with Jan and Seth MacMichaels.

Outside again, heading toward the manufactured houses where Jan and Seth lived, she said, “Chief Ollie Briscoe began calling Seth Sonny, and now almost everyone does, and he hates it. So don’t call him Sonny.”

“I wouldn’t have thought of it until you told me not to. Now, I don’t know. What if it pops out?”

“Ollie also said he’s a loaded gun looking for someone to shoot. So watch it. That’s all I can say.”

They both laughed. Jan worked at Safeway and Seth was fulfilling a two-year contract as a police officer in Brindle, his first job after finishing police academy. Eventually he wanted to work as a investigator for the state police, she told Barney, but he was too young and green, and with the budget cuts they had endured, the department wasn’t hiring anyway.

It was unfortunate, Todd thought a few minutes later, but Seth did look like someone who should be called Sonny. He was tall and broad, built like a football player, a high-school varsity player, with a lot of reddish-blond hair, a big open face, and candid blue eyes. He was sunburned, as if he never really tanned, but burned again and again. His nose was peeling. Jan was dimply and cute with masses of dark curly hair, heavy eye makeup, and a Barbie-doll figure.

They were seated under an awning at the rear of the house that was radiating heat, as was the concrete slab of a deck. “Bake in the summer, freeze in the winter,” Jan said. “I can’t tell you how jealous I was when I heard you got a real house. It wasn’t available when we were looking.” She took a long drink of beer from a can. Seth was grilling buffalo burgers. “When we get back out in the real world,” she said, “I intend to go back to school. I think it’s terrific that you’ve hung in there like you have.”

“To study what?” Barney asked.

“I don’t know. Something to do with people. No computers, and no numbers.”

Barney grinned and held up his beer can in a salute. “My sentiments exactly.”

“These are about ready,” Seth said. “Hon, you want to bring out that tray?”

Jan stood up and went inside, came back with a tray of salads from Safeway. “Chow,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind store salad. It’s too hot in there to cook. Thank God, it’s not as hot as last month, and by this time next month we’ll be freezing. That’s Brindle for you.”

After a bite or two of the buffalo burger, Todd said it was delicious. “Have you given up on beef?”

“Not if it’s local,” Seth said. He told them about a butcher shop out of Bend, local beef only. “If it comes from Grace Rawleigh’s ranch, you know it’s going to be great. Have you met her yet? She’s a direct descendant of the town’s founder, Joe Warden.”

They hadn’t. “You’re in for a treat,” Jan said with more than a touch of malice. “And now that her daughter Lisa’s in town for a visit, it’s like a two-scooper treat.”

Seth gave her a stern look and she grinned and shrugged. “Just repeating what I’ve heard. I haven’t met Lisa,” she said to Todd. “But from talk I hear at the store, she’s a bundle of fun. A ballbuster, if you get what I mean.”

Seth put his can down. “Jan, cut it out.”

“Okay. I’ll keep it clean. She and her ex are having a big fight over the spoils of a divorce, her third. From what I’ve heard, Lisa doesn’t feel like she’s met a man until she’s slept with him. And she’s a serial marrier who believes in marital freedom.” She rolled her eyes and grinned at Seth. “Clean enough?”

“Jesus,” he muttered. Before Jan could say more, he said, “Lisa lives down in L.A. She’s into movies, maybe produces or directs, something like that, not as an actress. She comes back every few years for a visit and sometimes, they tell me, there’s trouble while she’s here. And that’s all we know about her.” He gave Jan a warning look.

For a moment she met his look with an expression of defiance. Then she averted her gaze. “Plus she has mysterious plans for Brindle. She’s thirty-five. And that’s really all we know about her.”

But it wasn’t all, Todd thought. A new tension was in the air, the silence uncomfortable. “Are Sam and Grace still married?” she asked. “They don’t seem to live together.”

“They don’t,” Jan said promptly. “He lives in that big ugly stone house on Crest Loop, the one that looks like a gargoyle looming over the town. It’s Grace’s house but she hangs out at the ranch when she isn’t traveling. She’s gone a lot and hardly ever gets over here except to lay down the law about this or that. The hotel is hers, too. There’s a general manager or something who runs it. Mort Cline.”

“It seems to me that in such a small community, where everyone knows all about everyone else, there shouldn’t be any crime to speak of or any need to lay down the law,” Barney said.

Seth kept his gaze on a bun he was slathering with mustard as he said, “Just last week I had to break up a brawl. Three eight-year-olds in the park going at it. And yesterday I had to go tell an old man to stop burning trash outside. A real crime wave.” He put a burger on the bun and bit into it.

“Aha, so there’s more to Brindle than meets the eye,” Barney commented.

Jan looked at him, suddenly all traces of cuteness gone, her eyes narrowed, her face pinched. “Brindle is rotten to the core,” she said. “There’s something really foul about this place. I hate it!”

Seth put his hand on her arm and she drew back. “Sorry. Anyone, more beer?”



Walking home later, Todd asked, “What did you make of them?”

“Cute couple.”

“Come on, don’t be coy.”

He had his arm around her waist and hers was around him, but when they turned off First Street, lit with street lamps and shop windows, onto darker Juniper, his hand slid down to rest on her buttock. He said he liked to feel her muscles as she moved.

“Okay. She’s miserable, and he’s chomping at the bit, bored out of his skull. Enough?”

“More,” she said. “Something to do with Lisa. I guess we’re too new to let us in on whatever it is. Are you bored here?”

“No time to be bored.”

She believed that. He was working hard, and to her eye he was more contented than she had ever seen him.

“What about you?” he asked.

“No time,” she said. “Since the newspaper is in pretty good shape now, I’ll also be working with Ruth Ann on the centennial edition. Scanning stuff, enhancing old photographs. My kind of thing. And tomorrow we’ll meet the alluring Lisa and Grace. I’ll be watching you, kiddo. No funny stuff.”

He laughed and squeezed her bottom.



Seth scraped dishes as Jan loaded the dishwasher. “You can’t leave it alone, can you?” he asked, opening a can of beer.

“I thought he should be warned, or maybe she should be. Whatever.”

“You know nothing happened.”

“Not her fault.”

“Jesus, let’s drop it.”

They had been in Brindle three months when he’d seen a Corvette, speeding on the highway, make a squealing turn onto First and drive into the hotel parking lot. He had followed, and the memory of the encounter was still vivid.

“Miss, may I see your driver’s license?” he had asked the young woman walking toward the lobby. He already had his ticket book in his hand.

She stopped and turned, a thin young woman, blond, blue-eyed, who looked him over, then smiled slightly. “I’m afraid I don’t have it with me,” she said. “Are you the new policeman? Are you going to arrest me?” She held out her hands, as if waiting for handcuffs, smiling. “Or maybe we could go somewhere and talk it over. Privately.”

He backed up a step, her invitation as blatant as a prostitute’s in any red-light district. He felt his face flushing, heating. Then Ollie Briscoe, the chief, came from the lobby.

“What’s the problem?” he asked, drawing near them.

“He’s going to arrest me,” Lisa said. “Take me to a back room somewhere and…interrogate me.” She kept her gaze on Seth, her smile deepening.

“She was doing sixty coming into town, fifty pulling in the lot,” Seth said.

Ollie Briscoe waved him away. “You run along, Sonny. I’ll handle this.”

“Sonny,” Lisa said. “How adorable. I’ll be seeing you, Sonny.” She gave him another long appraising look, nodded, and repeated, “I’ll be seeing you.”

He had avoided her for the several days that she was in town, and now here she was back again. He took a long drink from his can, wishing that he had not told Jan about the incident. Her comment had been that if Lisa got anywhere near him, Jan would pull every hair out of Lisa’s head one by one, either before or after she scratched out her eyes.




Five


The alluring Lisa was a disappointment, Todd decided when they met at Ruth Ann’s house on Sunday. Lisa was too thin, brittle in a curious way with jerky movements, and if her jeans had been any tighter, she would have been immobilized. She had on high-heeled boots and a red silk shirt that could have been buttoned higher. Her hair was bottle platinum-blond, styled in a way that was meant to suggest no styling, pulled back over her ears, unevenly cut. When she met Barney, she held his hand too long and swayed toward him, moved in too close.

“Do you ride?” she asked. Her voice was low, throaty.

He extracted his hand, shaking his head. “Nope. Never was on a horse in my life.”

“What a shame. You’d be so handsome on a horse.”

Todd suppressed a smile as Barney moved out of Lisa’s range. She realized that Jan had been warning them about Lisa. But Grace Rawleigh, Lisa’s mother, was the real shock, she thought. She looked much older than Sam, and she was fighting it. Her hair was strawberry blond and carefully styled. Todd suspected more than one face-lift in her past, and the makeup she wore did little to hide the lines at her eyes or the vertical grooves on her forehead, and nothing at all for the look of disapproval that turned her mouth down. She smiled briefly at Todd, but the smile did not get beyond her thin lips.

Todd was relieved to see Johnny’s wife enter the living room. She liked Carol Colonna, a comfortable, handsome woman who had a very successful real-estate business in Bend. Carol smiled at her, then said, “Maria says brunch is up and waiting in the dining room.”

Ruth Ann was watching her guests with an amused expression. She had seen Lisa’s pass at Barney, and Todd’s dismissal of it as well as Barney’s polite withdrawal. And she liked the way Todd had behaved, like a well-bred, confident young woman. She knew Sam had watched his stepdaughter go into her act with annoyance. But Sam was always annoyed with Lisa, and usually did not even try to conceal it. He and Grace had exchanged brief nods when she had arrived, as if of recognition, and that was that. At least Grace had not found a reason to yell at him. That would have been awkward. Families, she thought, and led the way into the dining room.

She had told Maria to keep it simple, but Maria had done exactly as she pleased. Planked salmon, thin slices of beef in a sauce in a chafing dish, spiced shrimp, fruit salad, green salad, a platter of cheeses…It didn’t matter. The leftovers would make a good dinner. The food was on a long table, buffet style, and they started to help themselves.

“You’ll have to come out to the ranch,” Lisa was saying to Barney, her hand on his arm. “I’ll teach you to ride. We’ll have a real western barbecue. Next Saturday. Okay?”

He grinned and shook his head, moving as he did on down the buffet. “Thanks, but I’m afraid not. I’ll be in Corvallis until late Sunday.”

“Another time,” she said. “I’ll get you out there and on a horse. You’ll see.”

He filled his plate and went to the dining table where he sat next to Todd.

Johnny seated himself next to Lisa at the round table. “When do we announce it?” he asked her.

“You mean formally? As in the newspaper? Or just start a rumor?”

“Formally,” he said, turning to Todd and Barney. “We’re talking about turning Brindle into a destination resort. I’m building the mountain resort, and Lisa and Grace are considering a new hotel across the creek from Warden House. We’ll have wilderness hikes, skiing in winter, desert treks.”

“A mammoth heated swimming pool, a water slide, a wave machine,” Lisa said. “Live music, a dance floor. And we’ll have a dude ranch out at the ranch. We’ll coordinate it all, have a theme destination resort. We’ll put Brindle on the map.” She picked at her food, but ate little. “I’m all for putting up false fronts on the buildings on First Street, and maybe on Spruce, too, to recreate an old western town. I still think we should have horses in the park.” She put her fork down and said, “Llamas! We’ll have to use llamas as pack animals for the wilderness hikes. People love llamas!”

“You’ll have a part to play,” Johnny said to Todd. “We’ll need brochures, fancy proposals, all sorts of things. We’ll work that out at the press.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Lisa said. “We’ll need a real ad agency. I know just who to get when we’re ready.”

Todd felt Barney’s leg nudging hers, and on the other side of her Sam said, “Last time Lisa was in town she had a scheme to bottle water and start a business to compete with Evian. Now it’s Disney in her crosshairs.”

Lisa gave him a contemptuous look. “Some of us have visions, dreams. This hellhole of a town is going to shrink down to nothing and blow away in the wind unless someone does something. Not that it would be a great loss.”

Sam put his napkin on the table and stood up. “Thanks, Ruth Ann. Marvelous brunch as usual. But I have a patient I’m monitoring closely. I have to run.”

He nodded at the others and walked out. For a moment there was silence, then Carol began to tell Grace about a new development being planned on the outskirts of Bend.

A little while later, Todd felt Barney’s hand take hers under the table, and squeeze three distinct and separate times. She suppressed a smile and returned the signal. They did not linger much longer.

When they left, Lisa and Johnny were huddled talking and Ruth Ann looked tired, or perhaps simply bored. Grace and Carol had begun to talk about a dude ranch in a way that implied Grace was serious about it.

The day was pleasantly cool. They had walked up, and now took their time walking down Ruth Ann’s winding drive to Crest Loop. The road was narrow, with a gorge on one side, and the mountain rising like basalt stair steps meant for a giant on the other. At a curve before the footbridge, there was a view of the entire town, pretty and postcard peaceful. The creek, fifteen feet down, tumbled and splashed over rocks in a little waterfall, causing a spray that glittered like diamonds in the sunlight.

“What did you make of them?” Todd asked.

“Grace is an embittered woman,” Barney said. “You didn’t feel anything around Lisa, did you?”

“Like what?”

“Or sense anything either, I guess,” he said. “You don’t have the right receptors. She walks in a cloud of pheromones. And she knows it.”

“Well, there’s no love lost in that family, that’s for sure,” Todd said. “I don’t think Sam even spoke to Grace. And you saw the look Lisa gave him.”

They reached the footbridge and crossed the rushing creek, on its way to nowhere, she thought. All that busy rushing only to vanish in the desert. “Do you think they’ll carry through with plans for a resort here?”

“No idea.” He laughed and took her hand. “But no matter, you’re out of it. She wants a real ad agency.”

“And you would look handsome on a horse.”

He laughed harder. Then he said, “I wonder why Ruth Ann invited us.”

“She said so that we could meet a few more people,” Todd said after a moment.

He said, “Um,” in a noncommittal way. “Well, this life in the fast lane, high society, upper-crust brunches, it’s taking a toll. I feel a nap coming on.”

They were skirting the park where some boys were flying kites.

“Why are we walking so fast?” Todd asked.

“All those pheromones floating around. They gave me ideas.”

This time she laughed.



After Grace and Lisa left, while Carol helped Maria carry dishes to the kitchen, Johnny turned to Ruth Ann. “Why did you invite Todd and Barney? You knew I wanted some time with you and Lisa. We have to talk about this idea.”

“I got the impression that it was all settled. Is there anything in writing yet?”

“No. This is preliminary, the planning stage. We’ll get to that.”

Carol came back and picked up the last chafing dish. “I won’t be long,” she said to Johnny. “I want to get that shrimp recipe.”

When she was out of the room again, Ruth Ann said, “Johnny, just a suggestion. Watch your step. Don’t get too wound up with Lisa.”

He stiffened. “What exactly does that mean?”

“I think you know as well as I do what I mean.” For a moment neither of them moved, then he jerked around, faced away from her. “I know, Johnny. I’ve always known. And I know what it did to you before.”

“We might become business associates, Mother. Nothing more than that. Business.”

“Good,” she murmured. “I’ll see if I’m needed in the kitchen.”



If she had been honest, Ruth Ann reflected after all her guests had left, she would have told Johnny that she had invited Barney and Todd to protect him. She smiled slightly as she imagined his indignant reply. But it would have been truthful. She had seen Barney and Todd together enough times to consider Barney safe from Lisa, but she was not at all certain Johnny was. Lisa had snared him once when she was twenty and he was single and twenty-seven, home from college, home from a couple of years of knocking around, uncertain what he intended to do. He would have followed her to California, Ruth Ann knew, but Lisa had met an actor and no longer had time for Johnny. He had been devastated, possibly suicidal for a time. Within a year, he and Carol were married with a child on the way.

It was a good marriage, she knew, and Johnny was a faithful husband. But then there was Lisa. And she had gravitated to Barney as a filing to a magnet, just as Ruth Ann had suspected she would. Ruth Ann had seen her eyeing Barney speculatively as she picked at her food, and even later, gushing about plans for Brindle, she had kept an eye on him. Lisa probably wouldn’t linger more than a week or two, she rarely did, and although she might be planning a campaign to add Barney to her collection, he was safe. Todd would see to that even if he wavered.

Briefly she wondered how Lisa reacted if she failed to bag her catch. More uneasily, she wondered if Lisa had ever failed. She was glad that Barney would be away most of the coming week.




Six


After the mourners began to drift away from the cemetery Monday morning, Todd lingered to stroll among the grave markers, some fairly elaborate, more of them modest stone or even wood. The wooden ones were weathering badly, most of the words illegible on many of them. A harsh wind was blowing out of the north, and she was cold, but she didn’t want to join the caravan of cars crawling along back to Brindle.

The cemetery was bleak, with a few clumps of sage, some tough-looking grass, shards of black obsidian gleaming in the sun, and a spray or two of plastic flowers on some of the graves. A marble headstone marked the grave of Michael Hilliard. Next to it was a smaller marble headstone: Jane Marie Hilliard, 1862–1888, then: Rachel Emmaline Hilliard, 1878–1880.

Todd gazed at the tombstones sadly. To lose a child only two years old must have been tragic. Jane Hilliard had been only sixteen when her child was born, only twenty-six when she herself had died. How lonesome it must have been out here a hundred years ago, just the desert, a few people in the way station, an occasional traveler.

The wind whipped a piece of paper past the graves, sent it skittering into a clump of sage where it clung for a second or two before it was released and blew off into the distance. Todd shivered, turned and left the cemetery. Warmer clothes, she was thinking, which meant a shopping trip on Thursday. High on her list was a warm hat, one she could pull down over her ears.



Ruth Ann was shivering when Thomas Bird stopped the car to let her and Maria out at the front door of the house. Thomas Bird drove on around to put the car in the garage.

“Coffee,” Ruth Ann said inside the house. “Strong and hot.” She started to walk toward the kitchen, but Maria took her elbow and turned her toward the hall.

“You go lay down and cover up. I’ll put on coffee and start some lunch.” Maria was dressed in her formal clothes, a long black dress and a heavy black woolen shawl. Today the ribbons in her braided hair were also black. She looked as broad as she was tall, but she was warm.

“Todd’s coming up with some pictures,” Ruth Ann said, yielding to the tug on her arm. “I won’t go to bed now, but I do want coffee. Let’s have lunch after she’s gone. Point her to the sitting room when she comes.”

Maria looked surprised, then nodded. Very few people were ever allowed in Ruth Ann’s sitting room. “I’ll bring coffee when it’s ready, and a cup for her. She looked frozen out there.”

“It’s the wind,” Ruth Ann said.

Maria agreed. “Change of season. It will blow awhile and settle down again. Summer isn’t done yet. Go on now. I’ll be in directly.”

Ruth Ann often thought of her house in a phrase her mother had used in the distant past: preacher-ready. Maria kept the large living room preacher-ready, the sofa, several chairs, a coffee table, end tables, all so clean they looked unused, and practically were unused, forever ready for the preacher. She entered her sitting room, and it was what the entire house would be like if left to her. The room was cluttered, with books, magazines, photographs of her two grandsons, of Johnny at every stage of his life, his and Carol’s wedding pictures, Maria and Thomas Bird’s wedding, odds and ends various people had given Ruth Ann over the years. A snow-scene paperweight, vases, ashtrays that she actually used now and then, a few very good paintings on the walls, an assortment of polished rocks from Sam, half a dozen beautifully carved birds, a gift from Thomas Bird. She had brought her old school desk to the house and it was in the sitting room, heaped with papers and photographs she had been sorting through. Her kind of room, she thought, sinking into a reclining chair bathed in sunlight. Leone had been right about the windows. From now until spring, the sun would enter this room and it was welcome.

After a few minutes she stood up, took off her coat and tossed it on a chair. Maria came in with coffee and arranged a carafe and cups beside the recliner, drew another chair closer, poured one cup of coffee, and on her way out picked up the coat. Ruth Ann knew that Maria would have this room preacher-ready in a minute if she permitted it.

When Todd arrived, she gasped at the room. She loved Ruth Ann’s house, but she had always thought it was almost too neat and tidy; in contrast, this room was perfect. She hoped she would be allowed in another time when she could linger and examine every object. She suspected that a story lay behind each one of them. “Your parents?” she asked, pointing to a studio portrait of a man and woman stiffly posed, unsmiling. The portrait was in an oval, carved metal frame, the glass bowed slightly.

Ruth Ann nodded. “Why do you suppose they always seated the man and had the woman stand in those old portraits? And they never smiled, did they? My mother was very beautiful.”

“I can tell,” Todd said. “Even without a smile, she’s lovely.”

She began to unpack her laptop. After she had it plugged in and positioned on an end table, they looked at the pictures she had taken with her digital camera at the cemetery. “I thought you would be able to see them better on the monitor than on the small camera screen. After you decide which one you want, I’ll put up the front-page layout with it in place.”

“You have the newspaper on your little computer?”

“Not really. Just on a CD, a compact disk. That’s how I can work at home. And the laptop is small, but it has even more room on the hard drive and more power than the computers in the office.”

Ruth Ann was impressed. She had known that Todd did much of her work at home, but she had assumed it was on a standard computer like hers at the office. She picked out the funeral picture to go with the obituary, and watched as Todd slid in a CD and opened a screen with the front page, then added the new picture. It looked like magic.

After Todd left, and lunch was over with, Ruth Ann thought again about how Todd was able to take old faded photographs and do whatever she did with them to make them as sharp and clear as if they had just been taken. The photograph of Louise when she was a teacher at the one-room school, faded, yellowed and brittle with age, had come to life again with Todd’s tricks. No wonder the new generation loved their toys, she mused.

But she was really thinking of the photographs she had come across in Louise Coombs’s box. She had a box just about like that of her own, as well as whatever her mother had preserved of her father’s papers. At first she had been thinking of no more than a simple print special edition for the centennial, perhaps a one-page insert, but she was reconsidering. Old pictures of the town as it had been, from its first days on. The people who had lived here, even letters…Todd said she could scan anything on paper, digitize it, enhance it, reproduce it.

Second by second, a much more elaborate special edition was reforming in Ruth Ann’s mind.



Usually Todd and Barney cooked dinner together, but since Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were her only really busy days, on those nights he most often made dinner and had it ready when she got home. That night, chilled again by the strong wind, she entered the house, then called out, “Fe, fi, fo, fum. That smells good and I want some.”

“Maniac,” he said from the kitchen. “Lasagna, ten minutes. Wash your hands.”

They ate at the kitchen table and she told him about the funeral. “There must have been a couple hundred people there. And I was freezing. That wind was brutal today.”

“I know. I walked down to Safeway. We need to get out our winter gear. Summer or winter here, no in-between apparently. Guess who I saw at Safeway.”

“I give already. Who?”

“Miss Sexpot herself. She wanted me to buy her a cup of coffee, to warm her up, she said.”

“Oh dear,” Todd said. “You’ll have to come by the office to borrow my whip and chair.”

“I told her I was mentally conjugating Greek verbs and couldn’t be distracted. You might try that line with Shinizer. It worked with the sexpot.”

“Two problems,” she said, shaking her head. “He wouldn’t know what conjugating means, and he doesn’t know a verb from a velocipede. Anyway, after I told him that what he claims is friendliness the law considers sexual harassment, he hasn’t come within ten feet of me. Deal. You take care of the sexpot and I’ll take care of the bum. I can, you know.”

“I know you can, tiger. Deal. What’s a velocipede?”

Grinning, she said, “It’s a two-wheeled horse that little boys rode in Victorian novels.”

He looked doubtful and she laughed and started to clear the table.



Todd was dreaming. She was standing on a vast dun-colored plain with not a landmark in sight, no grasses, no rocks, nothing, just the endless plain. A strong wind was blowing granules of ice at her and no matter how she twisted and turned, they kept blasting her in the face. She ducked her head and tried to protect her face, her eyes, but the wind was too strong. “Don’t cry,” she told herself. “Don’t cry.” Tears would freeze on her cheeks.

“Todd! Wake up!”

“Don’t cry,” she whimpered, struggling against the wind, weeping.

“Todd! Come on, wake up.”

She jerked awake with Barney’s hands on her shoulders. She was shaking with cold.

“A door must have blown open,” he said. “Where’s another blanket?”

She couldn’t stop shaking. “Closet shelf.” She pointed and pulled the covers tighter around herself. Barney hurried to the closet and yanked another blanket from the shelf, wrapped it around her. He was shivering, too.

“I’ll go close the door. Be right back.” Pulling on his robe, he left the room. She huddled under the covers, drew herself up into a ball, and realized that she was weeping, her face was wet. Even with the covers over her head, she couldn’t stop shivering, and she couldn’t stop crying.

Barney was back. “Come on,” he said. “This bedroom is like an icebox. I put a log on the fire. We’ll be warmer there.”

He had moved the sofa in front of the fireplace, where a hot fire was blazing. They sat holding each other on the sofa, wrapped in a blanket, not talking. Gradually the warmth reached her and the shivering subsided, with only an occasional tremor coursing through her. Barney got up and left, returned with a box of tissues. “Are you okay?” he asked. At her nod, he said, “I’ll make us some hot cocoa. Be right back.”

She didn’t know how long they sat on the sofa before the fire, sipping the sweet hot cocoa. Eventually they moved the blanket away, but they didn’t get up.

Then, warm through and through, even sweating a little, she said, “There wasn’t an open door, was there?”

After a moment he said, “No. Why were you crying?”

“I don’t know,” she said in a low voice. “It wasn’t just me. You were freezing, too, weren’t you?”

“I was pretty damn cold,” he said, “but you were like ice. And crying. You were dreaming, crying in your dream. Do you remember the dream?”

Miserably she shook her head. She had to fight back tears, because sitting there with the fire, with Barney’s arm around her shoulders, safe and comfortable, she felt a nearly overwhelming sadness, a loneliness such as she had never experienced before. “Let’s go back to bed,” she whispered.



Ruth Ann was dreaming that she was a small child in the old press room where the machinery was gargantuan, high over her head, making ogrelike growling noises. Her father spread blank newsprint on the floor and she began to help him paste up the news stories, crawling over the paper on hands and knees. She had a paste pot and a brush and carefully brushed the paste on an article, then crawled around trying to find where to place it. Her mother said, “For heaven’s sake! Look at you. You’re all over ink.”

Ruth Ann stood up and looked at her knees and both hands, then stamped her foot, and her mother said, “Don’t you stamp your foot at me, young lady.”

She stamped her foot again and her father laughed as the newly pasted news stories came unstuck and scattered.

She woke up when the cold descended, and this time when Maria glided into the room carrying the electric blanket, Ruth Ann had already put on sheepskin slippers and a heavy wool robe.

“I won’t be going back to bed until this air mass moves on,” Ruth Ann said. “In fact, I was going to go make a cup of tea. I’ll make two cups.”

“It’s the shadow,” Maria said. “It moves out when it’s ready. I’ll put this on your bed in case you want it later.” Maria had on a heavy robe, but her feet were bare.

“I can’t understand why you don’t get cold when this happens,” Ruth Ann said in the kitchen a few minutes later, seated at the table sipping the tea she had insisted on making herself the way she liked it, black and strong, and in a big mug. Maria had a cup, half tea, half milk, the way she liked it.

“I get cold, but not like you do,” Maria said. “And Thomas Bird, he hardly notices it.”

“Strange,” Ruth Ann murmured. “I was thinking earlier how many things are strange. People think that when you get old you suddenly get smarter, or at least wiser, and I doubt that. You just have more memories.”

“Isn’t that what wiser means? More things to compare and weigh with?”

“You won’t get smarter,” Ruth Ann said. “You’re already too smart for your own good.”

“What other strange things were on your mind?” Maria asked.

Ruth Ann drew her robe tighter. She was very cold, but the tea was helping, and she knew the cold spell would not last very long. It never did. “Earlier,” she said, “when Todd was here we were looking at that picture of my mother and father, and I began to realize one of the reasons I like Todd and Barney so much. They remind me of my parents. Isn’t that strange?”

“Not how they look.”

“No. No. They don’t look at all like them. How they act, how playful they are together, trusting and honest. Things like that. Their attitude, I suppose.” She held her mug of tea, the heat felt good on her hands. “My parents were like that,” she said softly. “Laughing, playing, teasing a little. I think funerals make you think of such things.” Then more briskly she said, “Maria, it’s two-thirty. Go to bed. I’ll be awake a bit, but you should go on to bed.”

Even this was strange, Ruth Ann thought when Maria agreed that she was tired. People probably thought of them as mistress and servant, but she knew that they were simply two old friends who could share a cup of tea and chat easily at two o’clock in the morning.

Back in her sitting room, Ruth Ann stood before the portrait of her parents. She wished that they had smiled for the photographer. She had never seen her father looking that stern, he certainly had never directed such a look at her. Now she felt as if his eyes were looking through her. That’s how they posed them in those days, she thought, but he was looking at her, demanding, commanding….

“Tomorrow, Dad. I’ll start tomorrow.” She had saved the newspaper, and her mother had saved the other papers. It was time to see what was in them.



Todd snuggled close to Barney, comforted by his deep breathing, by the warmth of his body next to hers, but she couldn’t go to sleep. Usually they both fell asleep almost instantly, the way children do, the way she had done most of her life, but she was wakeful that night. She had been crying in her sleep, she thought, disturbed by the idea that a dream could have induced real tears, even sobbing, and then vanished from memory leaving no trace.

She knew that hers had been a fairly easy life compared to most people she knew, especially compared to Barney. Nothing terribly traumatic had ever happened to her; she had loving parents, loving brothers even if they had teased her unmercifully, three living grandparents. The last time she had cried like that, she recalled, had been when the family dog, Dash, had died, and they all had cried over him. She had been eight.

She never had minded the cold before. Growing up in Colorado, she had skied and ice skated, enjoyed winter sports most of her life—but the cold air that had invaded the house was not like any cold she had ever known. Barney had felt cold, too, although nothing like the chill she had experienced twice now, or the feeling of loneliness and desolation that came with it…. It had started in the hotel that night. If she had not stayed in the hotel, maybe it would not have found her, targeted her. She tried to banish the thought, but it persisted. The cold had targeted her.

Not just her, she told herself. Others felt it, too, an inversion setting in and then dissipating—in what, the wind? That made no sense at all. No door had been open that night, and no wind had been blowing back in August the first time. She knew this kind of thinking drove Barney wild. It was exactly what he was struggling to denounce in his dissertation: superstition, fear of the inexplicable, feeling targeted by the unknown.

There is always an explanation, he would say, even if we don’t know what it is yet. She closed her eyes tight. If he had felt it the way she had, he wouldn’t be so certain of that.

She remembered Jan’s vehemence when she said there was something rotten about Brindle, how she hated it. “She’s right,” Todd heard her own voice in her head. “There’s something rotten here, something wrong, something evil.”




Seven


Mornings in the Schuster house were always hectic after Mame Schuster left for work. Jodie scurried around making sure the boys were up and getting dressed, making sure they didn’t settle in front of the television, that they ate breakfast. She tried on one shirt after another, not satisfied with the results, and finally pulled on a sweatshirt that she would wear all day no matter how hot it became. She had never worried about her body until this semester, her first in high school, when all her friends were getting real figures. She was saving money to buy a padded bra, but she had decided not to tell her mother. Saturday she would go to the mall with her best friend Kelly and buy it.

She yelled at her little brothers to get moving or they would be late, and for Bobby for heaven’s sake to tie his shoes. His socks were not matched, but he liked it that way. Half the kids in his second-grade class would have mismatched socks. They thought it was cool.

“And put your dishes in the dishwasher!” she called on her way to the bathroom to give her hair a final brushing. She was putting her algebra book and spiral binder in her backpack when the boys left. They would ride their bikes down to the field across Brindle Creek where the school bus would come. They liked to get there early to fool around with the other kids. She checked the table, wiped up a little milk. Bobby always managed to spill a little.

She was worried about one of the algebra problems, certain her answer was wrong, but it was the best she could do. Algebra was hard for her. She closed her backpack, grateful that this year she had one with wheels. It was time for her to leave.

They always used the back door, as she did that morning. She stepped out, maneuvered her backpack over the sill, reached past it to shut the door, and someone grabbed her from behind, an arm hard around her chest, something cold pressed on her face. She tried to kick, but she was being held too tight, and she couldn’t breathe. Her struggles weakened, then stopped.



She moaned and twisted her head, trying to escape a bright light that hurt her eyes. Her head ached and her tongue was thick and dry. After a moment she opened her eyes and, shielding them with her arm, she sat up. She was on a bed. A wave of nausea rose. She thought she would vomit and closed her eyes again, but it passed. After a moment she cautiously opened her eyes just a little, squinting in the bright light.

It wasn’t a real bed. Just a mattress on the floor. And her clothes were gone. She was wearing a dress of some sort, pink and soft, and nothing else. No underwear, no shoes or socks.

Memory rushed in and with it a tidal wave of fear.

“Who’s here?” she said faintly. “Where is this place? Where are you?”

She pulled herself to her feet, shaking, holding on to the wall behind her, and looked around. She was in a long narrow room with lights in the ceiling. Everything was pale yellow, the walls, a carpet on the floor, the ceiling.

There were two doors, one partly open. She hurried to it and pushed it open farther. A bathroom. She ran across the long room to the other door. It was locked. Frantic, she looked around the room again.

There was a table with two chairs. A television was high on the wall, out of reach, with a remote control on the table. A bookcase, books, magazines. A small refrigerator. No windows on the smooth walls.

She was breathing in long shuddering gasps, as if she couldn’t draw in enough air. She ran to the table and tried to lift one of the chairs. Break down the door! The chair was bolted to the floor. The table was bolted down, the remote on a chain. Desperately she looked for something to use to break the door. There wasn’t anything. She ran back to the door and tried the doorknob again and again, then pounded on it with her fists, yelling for help. She turned to face the room once more, rising panic making it hard to breathe. Her fear gave way to terror. She began to scream.

Above the door a red video camera light had gone out; Jodie was out of range. On the underside of the table, a tape recorder taped every scream until she collapsed, exhausted, when it turned itself off.




Eight


“Come on back,” Ruth Ann said on Thursday when Todd arrived. It was eleven o’clock, and Todd was ticking off the chores to be done, including checking in with Ruth Ann, before she left for shopping in Bend. A stocking cap, she had decided. One she could pull down over her ears when the wind started up again—but her choice of hat was far less pressing than it had seemed the day before. Today was like summer with a soft warm wind and hot sunshine.

Ruth Ann led the way to the dining room, where, to Todd’s surprise, there were a number of cardboard cartons on the floor, and one opened on the big dining table.

Ruth Ann waved toward the boxes. “My source material for the history,” she said. “I can’t lug all this stuff down to the office and go through it there, so I’ll set up shop right here. Are you through at the newspaper for the day?”

“Yes. Thursdays are pretty light.”

“I know. That’s when I usually did my shopping, that’s why I asked you to come up today. Todd, what I want to do is have my own computer here, one like yours, small, compact, and powerful. With a scanner and a good printer.”

Todd could see her point. Her office in town was too cluttered to handle the boxes on the floor. “We could move a computer over here,” she said.

“No, no. Those are all linked somehow, and even if I want to be tuned in from time to time, I don’t want anyone messing around with my copy. Sorry, Todd, I know you’ve done a wonderful job down there, but still I prefer a separate system.” She smiled ruefully, shook her head, then added, “Actually, I don’t want Johnny to know yet what I’m planning. He’s thinking of a one-page story for the centennial, but it keeps growing on me. That’s off the record, by the way.”

“Okay. What can I do?”

“Buy my computer and the other things I’ll need and get it up and working, teach me how to use it. I’m a good typist and that’s all I know how to do on a computer, treat it like an expensive typewriter. I hope it isn’t too much of an imposition.”

Todd grinned. “I had a long lonely weekend facing me,” she said. “This is much better. Let’s talk about what you’ll need, what you want to do, how much you’re willing to spend, if you’ll want the Internet, cable connection, DSL, or dial-up….”

Ruth Ann had a feeling that this all might take more than just a few days. They went to her sitting room and began.

When Todd left with Ruth Ann’s credit card, Ruth Ann told Maria they would invite her to dinner.

“With that table in such a mess?” Maria asked. She scowled first at Ruth Ann, then at the dining table.

Ruth Ann scowled back. “We’ll eat in the kitchen. Don’t be a scold.”

Maria was not appeased. She called Ruth Ann’s sitting room “creeping chaos,” and seemed to think that the chaos was in full gallop, threatening to run over the preacher-ready rooms. When Ruth Ann asked Thomas Bird to move a lamp stand to the table, Maria’s scowl grew fiercer.



It was after nine before Todd was ready to leave Ruth Ann’s house that night. She had done a lot with the new computer system, but more remained to be done. “Just don’t be afraid of it,” she said. “Play around, try this and that. Short of taking a hammer to it, there’s nothing you can do that I can’t undo.” She would put in a few hours at the office tomorrow and come by around one to finish installing things, she added at the door.

She hesitated, then asked, “When that mass of cold air comes in, do you feel it up here?”

Ruth Ann, sitting at the computer, became very still for a moment. “Yes. Was it terrible for you?”

“Pretty awful. I was freezing and I couldn’t get warm.”

“How about Barney? Did it affect him?”

“Some, just not the way it hit me. It’s…it’s weird.”

“Todd, no one has been able to explain it, and it’s been around all my life, just like last night. It doesn’t get worse, but it doesn’t stop, either. It appears that some of us are more affected by it than others, possibly we’re more sensitive to the sudden change. Usually outsiders hardly notice. Another sweater, or turn the thermostat up a notch and that takes care of it.”

More slowly then, she added, “Some people feel depressed, or have other emotional reactions.” She was watching Todd closely and saw her swift expression change, not to relief, exactly, but perhaps reassurance that she had not overreacted. “It used to distress me profoundly, but now I just get very cold until it passes. Don’t be alarmed, my dear. We seem to have a local phenomenon without an explanation. Like the Vortex Houses, something like that, I imagine.”

She knew she had gone too far when Todd’s expression changed again to one of polite disbelief that came and vanished quickly.

“Good enough,” Todd said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Ruth Ann sat without moving for a long time after Todd left. She thought of her as almost a child, she mused, although when she was twenty-eight she had believed herself to be highly sophisticated and smarter than most people she knew. Now twenty-eight seemed still in the development stage. But Todd had felt more than cold, she knew. Her expressions hid little of what she was feeling. Still malleable, impressionable. Susceptible. Why her, an outsider? She shook herself.

For a long time she had believed the cold to be supernatural, but she had abandoned that idea when it persisted through the years without changing, without doing anything. If it was supernatural, what was its point? she had demanded of herself one day, and almost immediately after that she had gotten rid of all the books she had collected on ghostly phenomena. The cold air in Brindle didn’t fit any of the patterns, and it didn’t do anything. It just was.

But her question kept repeating: why Todd? Why had Todd felt more than an Arctic chill in the air, the way she herself always did?



Walking to the Bolton Building the next morning, Todd saw a sheriff’s car parked in front of the police station down the block from the newspaper. She entered her own building. “What’s going on with the police?”

Lou Shinizer was at his desk reading a Bend newspaper. He always looked hungry, with prominent cheekbones, somewhat sunken eyes, but his undernourished appearance was contradicted by a paunch. With black hair worn Prince Valiant–style, and steeply arched eyebrows that she suspected he kept trimmed and shaped, he looked like a man past his prime who thought he qualified for a position as a rock star or a TV personality. He hardly glanced up at her that morning. “Nothing,” he said and continued reading.

“Jodie Schuster didn’t go to school yesterday and didn’t show up last night,” Mildred said. “Her mom called the sheriff and Ollie.”

Todd glared at Shinizer. “Why aren’t you over there finding out what’s going on?”

“Told you. It’s nothing. Kid’s staying out of sight a day or two. If there’s a story, they’ll tell us.”

She wheeled about and walked out, seething.

She had described Ollie Briscoe to Barney as the Pillsbury Doughboy done in shades of red-brown, and that morning he was more red than brown when she walked into the police station. He was at his desk, and a deputy sheriff was sitting across from it.

“Morning, Todd,” Ollie said. He turned to the deputy. “This is the new girl over at the newspaper,” he added, as the deputy stood up and nodded at her.

“What’s this about a missing girl?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Ollie said. “Kid had a hassle at school, boyfriend made eyes at another girl, or her mother gave her what-for over something. She’s at a pal’s house, or her aunt’s place. Happens. Sonny’s out asking around.”

“How old is the girl?”

“Now, Todd, let’s not make a big deal out of it. Kids do this. We ask around, they show up, get time out or something. Happens.”

“How old is she and when did she go missing?” Todd’s tone sharpened.

Ollie heaved a big sigh and stood up, came around his desk, and took her by the arm. “If anything turns up, we’ll give you a call. There’s nothing here for you. Now you run along. You’re doing a real fine job over at the paper. That was a nice piece about Louise Coombs.” He was propelling her toward the door. “You just go on about your business, and we’ll get on with ours.”

She stopped moving and twisted around to look at the deputy. Fortysomething, thick in the chest, very clean looking and fair, with an expression that told her nothing.

“Why did the mother call the sheriff’s office?” she asked him. “She must think there’s more to it than a kid off pouting.”

He shrugged. “She got excited, maybe. Mothers do that.”

Todd looked from him to Ollie, then shook off Ollie’s hand on her arm and walked out stiffly. They weren’t going to tell her a damn thing, she thought furiously.

When she entered her own building again, Ally looked up from her desk, held her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone; Mildred stopped whatever she had been doing, and Toni stopped key-stroking to look at her. From his desk, Shinizer said, “Hold the press! Our interpid girl reporter just came in with the scoop. Little green men snatch local—”

Todd kept walking toward her own office. Behind her, she heard Johnny say sharply, “Cut the crap, Shinny.” Todd entered her office with Johnny right behind her. He closed the door.

She walked to her desk and sat down. Johnny went to the window, looked out, glanced at the papers on her desk, at her monitor with a screen saver of the sphinx morphing to a pyramid, and finally took a seat opposite her desk.

“We have a new ad,” he said. “Germond’s furniture store in Bend. Advertising is on the upswing.”

She nodded, waiting for the real purpose of his visit.

“Look,” he said, “you’ve been here some weeks now. What’s there to do here for teenagers? Anything? It’s a great community for little kids, safe as heaven for them, but for teens? Nothing. They see TV, videos, movies, magazines. They know what’s out there and they want theirs.” He looked past her at the wall. “Ollie says about eighty thousand kids a year take off. Just take off. Pictures on milk cartons, all that. Some of them come from here. Ten, twelve over the past dozen years. Gone a few days, months, even longer, then most of them check in again. A phone call begging for money, a note or postcard, or the girls show up with a baby. Some get picked up here and there on vagrancy charges, drug charges, soliciting. Name it.”

He stopped, as if waiting for a response. She didn’t move, watching him.

He stood up. “Okay, my point is that there isn’t a story here. We get mixed up in it and sooner or later the girl is picked up and brought home, and there’s juvenile court, the children’s services agency, foster homes, a goddamn mess, and no one thanks you for butting in.”

“What if it’s more than that?” she asked when he paused again. “What if she didn’t just take off?”

Johnny shook his head. “They look for evidence. You know, blood, signs of a struggle, a menacing stranger hanging around, the usual suspects.” His grin was a feeble effort as he spoke. It came and went quickly. “Absent any sign like that, it’s a runaway, just like thousands of others. You can’t make a federal case of eighty thousand kids!”

He went to the door, where he stopped and said, “How long do you suppose any outsider would go unnoticed in Brindle on a school morning? People going to work, kids on the way to the school bus. They’ll find her in a girlfriend’s bedroom, or in someone’s rec room, a relative’s house. Bring her home, tears all around, no media circus, and life goes on. Or else in a week or two Mame will get a call or a card or something. She’ll be embarrassed, apologetic, or boiling mad. What are you going to do, chain kids to the water pipes?” He gave Todd a hard look, opened the door and said, “Just leave it alone unless something develops.”

Todd sat at her desk for several minutes after Johnny left. Leave it alone. Don’t rock the boat. Keep it in the family. Mum’s the word…. By next week when the newspaper came out the girl would be back home, back in school, all forgiven, forgotten. She pulled her notepad closer and jotted down two names: Jodie Schuster and Mame Schuster.

At last, she began to look over the papers on her desk—Shinizer’s school board meeting minutes, the water commission meeting, birth of twins to someone or other…. It was no use. Drivel, she thought, gathering the notes and items together and stuffing them into her computer case. Homework. She needed something to occupy the late hours while Barney was away, and with a weekly it didn’t matter where or when she did this kind of work as long as she had it ready by Wednesday. She decided to go to Ruth Ann’s house and do something that might take her mind off Jodie Schuster.



By late afternoon, she felt that Ruth Ann had mastered enough to be comfortable using the computer to write her history.

“I thought I knew the history pretty well,” Ruth Ann admitted, “but there are too many blanks. When exactly did Joe Warden arrive, for instance? No one ever said to my knowledge. How did the two men, Joe Warden and Mike Hilliard, become partners? Why? Another blank. We know Joe Warden had a son but nothing about the child’s mother.”

“How did Jane Hilliard die?” Todd asked, recalling the sad tombstone.

“That I do know,” Ruth Ann said. “She died in the fire when the original hotel burned to the ground.”

“She was so young,” Todd said. “Well, if you run into trouble, give me a call. And I’ll be around to do the scanning when you’re ready.”

“It may be a while,” Ruth Ann said, indicating the boxes. “I have just a bit of reading to do, and notes to make.”

“Just a bit,” Todd agreed, glad that she wasn’t the one to start plowing through all that old material.



Todd had talked to Barney and rewritten Shinny’s notes about meetings and a flu clinic that would be at Safeway in two weeks and then sat looking at the two names she had written earlier: Jodie Schuster, Mame Schuster. She knew about the bands of young people in Portland, hanging out at the malls, congregating downtown, forced to move on with nowhere to move on to. But ten or more runaways from a small community like Brindle? And no one was doing anything about it?

There really wasn’t anything in town for them, no swimming pool, no rec hall where they could get together and listen to music, dance, just fool around. No doubt the school held dances now and then, and there were team sports, maybe a drama group put on a play once or twice a year. But they needed more than that, a place of their own where they could get together regularly.

An editorial, she decided. She would write a series of editorials, research what other small towns did for their young people. Not until Jodie Schuster checked in, she thought, remembering Johnny’s words. Evidently the newspaper had run a story about a runaway, only to be subjected to a lot of criticism for it when the kid turned up again. Maybe, because Johnny had been stung, he had exaggerated about how many kids had run away from Brindle, trying to make it seem commonplace, not worthy of a story. Okay, she told herself. First research, information, then a series of editorials. And have something just a little more interesting than school board meetings and flu clinics in the newspaper.

She could not account for, or even identify, the tingle that passed through her as she picked up her pen to make a note about the missing children of Brindle.




Nine


On Saturday, Todd found many photographs aligned on the dining table. “I tried to put them in chronological order,” Ruth Ann said, “as much as possible, anyway. Most of them don’t have dates, of course. But that’s the original Warden’s Place in the early years, maybe at the start. There are several photos of it, some with him and Hilliard, one with Janey with them. They all lived in it.” The pictures were fanned out, and she spread them a bit so that each one was visible. She put the one with Janey aside. “I know I’ll want that one, but I haven’t decided which of the others I’ll use. The first church,” she said, pointing to the next set. “My grandfather was preacher there.”

She pointed to several other photographs, the first one-room school with a teacher in a rigid pose and six children who looked petrified. Four of them were barefoot. She put that one aside, also. “In,” she said.

“I’ll skim through the diaries and letters and try to get a clue about who all those people were,” Ruth Ann said, “and date them if I can. I want to use pictures with people as much as possible, but only if I can identify them.”

“They all look so grim,” Todd said. The children’s clothes looked either too big or too small, smock dresses on the girls, shapeless pants and shirts on the boys. Women were wearing high-neck dresses with long sleeves, aprons or shawls, and what seemed to be laced boots. So much for the glamorous west of moviedom, she thought.

“I suppose they were grim for much of the time,” Ruth Ann said. “It was a hard life. One of the diaries says that it was an all-day trip to Bend, another day to stock up on staples, then a whole day coming home again. No running water, no electricity, no plumbing. A hard life and a lonesome one.”

She had put aside four of the photographs for Todd to start working with, the others to be decided upon later. She went back to resume reading the diaries in her sitting room, and Todd went to work on the pictures.

She was so young, Todd was thinking a few minutes later, working on the photograph of Janey with Mike Hilliard and Joe Warden. Her hair was parted in the middle, drawn back, probably in a bun; her hands were clasped before her. Standing between the two men, she looked diminutive, frail and frightened. Todd remembered what Johnny had said about the runaways—what was there in Brindle for kids to do? What had there been for Janey? Sixteen, with an infant, in a wilderness, alone with two much older men who both looked stern and rough, staring at the camera as if it were the enemy.

Todd was working on the picture with the school children when Ruth Ann reappeared from her sitting room, yawning.

“I fell asleep,” she said. “Bad poetry put me to sleep. Todd, stop for the day. You’ve been at it for hours.”

“Let me show you what I have,” Todd said. “Here’s the photo of Janey with her husband and Warden.”

Ruth Ann studied the printout, then nodded. “I think she had a dimple,” she said.

“I think so, too. She was only a kid, almost a child herself.”

Ruth Ann put the printout down and shook her head. “From all accounts she was a prostitute,” she said. “They started a cathouse in Warden’s Place, and it seems she was a working girl there. It was rumored that she was carrying on with a customer when her daughter drowned in Brindle Creek.”

Todd stared at her, then at the printout. How could she have left a two-year-old child alone by that ice-cold water? “Is that what you’re going to write about?”

“Only if I can verify it. You young people don’t know what real censorship is these days. No one, to my knowledge, has ever openly talked about what really went on in the early years. Mothers whispered things to daughters or to each other. Not outright. Coded. They invented coded language. Men, no doubt, talked among themselves, told things to their sons perhaps. Whispers. Innuendos. Hints. Sex was the ultimate dirty word, one that no decent person uttered. I think it’s time this town learned the truth about Warden and the Hilliards.”

“Why?” Todd said. “It’s a hundred-year-old scandal. Why rake it through the ashes now?”

Ruth Ann’s expression had become as grim as those in the photographs. “Every few years someone brings up the idea of a monument to our founders,” she said. “Grace Rawleigh is pushing for it and this year, the year of the centennial, she intends to force it through. She can afford it, but she intends for the town to foot the bill. I intend to stop that. This town needs a lot of things, and a monument in the park to feed Grace’s ego isn’t one of them.”

“A youth center,” Todd said. “That’s what the town needs. Did you hear about Jodie Schuster? A runaway girl?”

“Yes. Maria told me.”

“Do you know anything about her? How old she is, when she took off? Anything?”

“She’s fourteen,” Ruth Ann said. “Her mother’s a nurse at the hospital in Bend. She left Jodie and her two little brothers at home when she went to work on Thursday morning at six-thirty. Jodie gets the boys off on their bikes at about seven-thirty, and then she walks down to catch the school bus. That morning she didn’t get on the bus, and no one has seen her since.”

Only fourteen! Todd thought in wonder and dismay. She hesitated a moment, then said, “Whose permission do I need to run a series of editorials about runaway children, youth centers, things of that sort? Yours or Johnny’s?”

“I’m still the publisher,” Ruth Ann said sharply. “Do it.” She started to gather the photographs together, then added, “Don’t count on any of the council members for cooperation, not Ollie Briscoe, and probably not Johnny. They all would cage the devil and put him on display if they thought it would bring in a tourist dollar.”



Todd walked home deep in thought. Seth, she decided. If she could talk him into helping her find local information, that would be step one. She couldn’t use only national statistics, she had to tie her editorials to the local community, to these people here and their runaway kids. She got her Acura out and drove to Safeway. It was five minutes before six and she knew that Jan got off at six on Saturdays.

She parked, then waited until a minute or two after six before leaving her car as Jan was coming out of the store.

“Too late,” Jan said as Todd approached. “We’re closed.”

“I was really looking for you,” Todd said. “I wanted to ask you and Seth to come to dinner tomorrow night.”

Jan’s smile vanished and she said in exasperation, “Wouldn’t you know it. Nothing happens all the time and when it does, it’s all at once. We have pals coming through tomorrow on their way to Vegas for a vacation. How about a rain check? And a cup of coffee with me right now? I’m heading for the Terrace Café for some coffee, or maybe a glass of wine, to wait for Seth. He’s still at the station. When he comes we’re off to Bend, have a bite to eat, and see a movie. Our big night on the town.”

Perfect, Todd thought in satisfaction. She couldn’t have arranged things better. They walked to the motel café with Jan chatting about her friends from Portland. They were both sipping chardonnay when Seth joined them.

The waitress was at his heels. He ordered a draft beer and sat next to Jan in the booth. “How are things?” he asked Todd.

“Pretty quiet,” she said. “Any news about Jodie Schuster?”

He shook his head. “The chief said I’m not to talk to you about that.”

“I know. He gave me the bum’s rush when I asked him about her. What do teenagers do around here for fun? You guys can take off to see a movie, but what about kids too young to drive? What do they do?”

“They drive,” Seth said. “Pile in one of their dad’s trucks, take shotguns out on the desert and shoot jack rabbits or coyotes. Sheriff business,” he added. He sounded bitter and defensive.

The waitress brought his beer and after she left, Jan said, “I’ve heard that years ago, when Lisa was home on a visit, she was full of ideas about building a theater here, to show first-run movies and have a film festival every summer. Like Sundance. I wish she’d done it. Going up to Bend to see a show is a drag, and like you said, the young kids can’t do it alone.”

Todd told them about her plan to try to raise interest in a youth center. “I’d need local stuff. You know, the kids who have taken off from here, their families. Like that,” she said. “Ollie won’t give me the time of day, but, Seth, you could help.”

His big open face took on a blank expression.

“What I want,” Todd said, “is a list of the runaway kids over the past ten to fifteen years. Names, how old they were, how the cases were resolved. I won’t use names, but I’d try to interview some of them who have come back, get their side of the story. Why they took off, things of that sort. It isn’t just about Jodie. It’s runaways in general.”

He shook his head. “No can do. Not without authority, which I have as much chance of getting as a snowball in you know where.”

“Yes, you can,” Jan said, leaning forward. “You’re alone in the station half the time. There’s a copy machine. Take out a file, make a copy, put it back. You don’t even have to hand anything over to Todd. I’d do that.”

“I can’t be forced to reveal any source of information,” Todd said. “Unwritten law of journalism. Confidentiality of sources. Holy writ or something.”

Even as Seth began to shake his head again, Jan said fiercely, “God, it’s a chance to shake up these zombies. It’s like being in a town of Stepford people, men and women, all Stepford zombies.”

“We could make a difference, Seth. Think about it.” As she spoke, Todd realized their waitress was hovering nearby. Todd finished her wine and pushed back her glass. Raising her voice slightly, she said, “Well, I’m off, shopping to do.”

The waitress began to move away as Todd pulled a five-dollar bill from her purse and stood up, saying, “Have fun at the movies.” She put the money on the table, nodded at the waitress and left.

Had the waitress been listening in? How much had she heard? Todd doubted that her own voice had carried, but Jan’s might have. And did it matter?



Ruth Ann’s eyes were tired that night. It was nearly eleven when she finished the last diary and put it back in its box. She had put several items aside for possible inclusion in her history, and now had only two packets of letters left to look through, and she would be finished with Louise’s box. Most of the material she had collected so far had been for human interest, nothing really newsworthy, except for some of the early photographs. She regarded the packets of letters with mounting impatience. Skip them and go on to bed, she told herself, but she wanted to be done with all this material. With a sigh she picked up the first of the letters.

More violet ink on stationery that had become brittle and an ugly tan. It was dated July 7, 1888, and signed “your loving daughter Mary.” Skimming it, Ruth Ann realized with a start that Mary had been on her honeymoon with Raymond McCormack in Portland, and the letter was all about the magnificent fireworks display they had watched. She smiled faintly at the thought of writing to her mother while on her own honeymoon in San Francisco. She had written a postcard, and had handed it to her mother on her return.

She skimmed the second letter, this one about a paddle-wheel boat ride. The third one stopped her when she saw the name Hilliard. She backed up to read it more closely.

…Two nights before my wedding, unable to sleep, and unwilling to disturb my dear sister, I put on my cloak and walked out to clear my mind of my anxiety. As I walked near the corral I saw flames in the windows of that House. I ran, thinking to ring the fire bell, to raise the alarm. I saw the Warden child coming from that House, staggering and running like a blind person. He fell down, lifted himself to run and fell again. Then I saw Mr. Hilliard step out of a shadow and hasten to the child. He lifted him and started to carry him back toward that House. Others began to call out and Mr. Hilliard stopped and turned and it appeared that he was carrying the child away from the inferno. I was very afraid and I hurried home. I was so greatly afraid that I said nothing. I am sorely troubled, Mama. Raymond said I must put it out of mind, it is not fitting to dwell on such matters. However, I find that I am unable to do so. When I return you must advise me, dearest Mama.

Her fatigue forgotten, Ruth Ann returned to the letters, but there was no other mention of the fire or Hilliard.

“They told her to keep her mouth shut,” she muttered when she finished them all. And she had done so. Hilliard had been acclaimed a hero, risking his life to save Joe Warden’s son.

Mary had been Louise Coombs’ grandmother. From mother to daughter, she thought, or daughter to mother, the rumors lived on in whispers, in hushed conversations, in letters bound with ribbons for more than a hundred years.




Ten


Late Sunday afternoon Ruth Ann was smiling over her father’s journal account of his courtship of her mother when Maria entered the sitting room to say that Sam had dropped in.

“You want me to bring him on back here?” she asked, eyeing the disorder with disapproval.

Ruth Ann glanced around, then stood up. “No. I’ll come out.” Normally she would have visited with him in the sitting room, but Todd and Barney would also drop in, and four people would be a crowd. The room was more cluttered than usual with open journals and her notebooks on two tables, a half-empty cardboard carton on a chair, another box of pictures on a different chair….

She met Sam in the foyer, held out her hands to him, and turned her cheek for his kiss.

“You’re looking chipper,” he said. “Am I interrupting something?”

“No, of course not. I’ve been reading my father’s journal. Courtship back in 1920 was not lightly undertaken or carried out.” She motioned toward the living room. “Sit down. Scotch, bourbon? You look like a man in search of a drink.”

He laughed. “Scotch.”

He went to the living room and she to the kitchen where she mixed his Scotch and water, and a bourbon and water for herself.

When they were both seated in the brocade-covered chairs, he took a long drink. “This is the only place I know where I can have a drink without everyone watching to see if I’ll stagger when I stand up,” he said.

“And if I have a drink with my doctor, Maria can’t scold,” she said. “Salud.” After a sip or two, she put down her glass. “You look tired. Hard week?”

He shook his head. “It’s those two women. Grace and Lisa. I know I shouldn’t let them get to me but, damn, they do. Grace insisted on a meeting. They’re off to Portland now and in a couple of days Lisa will fly back to Los Angeles, but she had to give the pot a stir before leaving. I think I irritated her over here last week. Get-even time. She’s as vindictive as her mother.”

“Oh, dear,” Ruth Ann said in sympathy. “Now what?”

“She told me to start looking around for an apartment or something. When she finalizes her plans for the destination resort, she’ll turn the house into a historical museum.”




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