by Nancy Bush
“Manipulation,” Catherine said one night when Tasha awoke screaming from a dream. “You learn very quickly.”
The dream still hanging on raggedly, Tasha said without thinking, “Like my mother.”
“Just like your mother.”
Catherine left and Tasha recalled the dream. Her body was tingling. Alive. She wanted to touch herself all over.
So this was the curse. Sex, she learned later. Desire.
Now Tasha lay breathing hard on the bed, staring out the window, hearing the whistle of the wind. Sex…desire…she must have experienced both, because how else was she pregnant? She knew about pregnancy. The teacher lady had waddled in right before she had her baby, and all the disciples were wide-eyed and excited. Therein followed a lesson on childbirth that had made Tasha feel slightly ill on the one hand, and worry desperately that she would never experience it on the other. How could she? Locked inside those cold walls.
She had to get out. She had to find a life to live.
Had to, had to, had to…
She saw now that she’d found a way out. This place, wherever she was, was not Siren Song. She had a life inside her. With exploring fingers, she slipped under her nightgown and felt the taut-skinned mound.
And there were scabs. Something…what?
Drawing up the gown, she gazed through the dim, nearly nonexistent light from the window, at her belly. Lines. Scratched across her.
Death lines.
She began shivering like she was about to explode. Scrabbling for the covers, she pulled them to her chin and lay beneath them, quaking furiously.
Help me, she thought. Help me.
I have to get out of here.
Help me!
Rita sat astride Paolo as if she were riding a bucking bronco. He lay beneath her and grabbed her breasts and humped upward and sweated and made a lot of huh, huh, huh sounds and then started screaming, “Baby, baby, oh, baby…” And that made Rita think about needing a baby and all her wetness started drying up and she worried that Paolo was too old. His chest hair was thick and graying, far more than the hair on his head, but maybe he used one of those products.
Still…
“C’mon,” she whispered against his ear. It was kind of off-putting, the little hairs that sprouted out like wires against her lips. “C’mon.”
“Baby…” He was breathing like he was going to have a heart attack. “Baby…”
Maybe she should be on the bottom, not the top. She needed to hang on to his sperm, if, and when, he finally gave her some.
“C’mon!”
“Huh, huh, huh.”
“Come…on.”
“Baby. Oh, baby! Ahhhh!”
And finally, there it came. Rita squeezed down hard, then slipped off him. She hoped she hadn’t made a mistake by getting on top.
“Hey,” he said, after a couple of minutes of getting his breathing under control. He slid his fingers lightly up and down her arm. “When I woke up this morning, I sure didn’t know this was going to happen.”
“Let’s make sure it happens again,” she said.
“Want to make another date?”
Rita wondered if it was the right time to ask for a job, decided it wasn’t, and leaned into him, reaching a hand down to start stroking his shaft. She didn’t have a lot of time. Tasha could be out of Halo Valley before she knew it. “How about tomorrow?”
“Same time, same place?”
“Can you get off earlier?”
He stared into her eyes. He was halfway to being her complete slave. Rita had seen the signs before. “Yes.”
“See you at six?”
“Yes…” He closed his eyes and she examined the skin along his jawline. A little tough-looking. A little old.
If she couldn’t get a baby out of this old fart, she was pretty sure she could get a job. But maybe she could get both.
Chapter 11
Lang drove west on Highway 26 and south on 101 into Deception Bay. The town was built on both sides of the highway and was like so many small, coastal Oregon beach towns, dotted with a few quaint restaurants and a couple of tired ones that looked as if they only survived on the good grace of a few dedicated locals. There was one gas station and one grocery store, the Drift In Market, if you didn’t count the snack wall behind the gas station cash register. Just off the rocky coastline was an abandoned lighthouse, the squatter’s home to a nutcase who’d killed a number of women and who was also incarcerated at Halo Valley Security Hospital. Beyond the lighthouse was a small island, as rocky and inhospitable as the cliffs along most of the shoreline. Lang felt like he knew some history about the island but it escaped him at the moment. He thought he should do a little Internet research, or maybe he could learn more from the locals.
But today he was looking for Cade Worster.
About a half mile farther he turned onto the two-lane blacktop road that led east toward the Coast Range foothills and, he hoped, some answers. He’d called Tanninger and had a talk with him about what he was doing, and also brought up his soon-to-be job with the Tillamook County Sheriff’s Department. Of everything Lang said, it was Deception Bay Tanninger had focused on.
“Deception Bay,” he repeated, sounding surprised.
“What?”
“Nothing. My girlfriend has ties to Deception Bay. Never heard of that town till a year ago.”
Lang had sensed a lot of unspoken information in the man’s voice and had probed around, not letting Tanninger off the hook, though he seemed to be instantly sorry he’d said anything.
Finally, he admitted, “Gemma’s been looking into her own history. She was adopted, but her birth mother’s from that area of the coast, apparently. She’s been looking for her.”
“Did she find her?”
“No. Could be a woman in a care facility around there whose mind’s not tracking and hasn’t been for a while.”
“So she’s not a Foothiller?”
“I hadn’t heard that term till you said it.”
His tone was so careful, as if he were vigilant about every word. Like there were dangers, minefields, that he had to step around. “For Pete’s sake. What is it you’re not telling me?” Lang demanded.
“Nothing. Nothing that’s related to your investigation, anyway.”
Lang recalled Curtis telling him that there was still some mystery surrounding Tanninger’s girlfriend, so maybe this was it, but he agreed that it was merely a sidebar to his own interest in the area. “You want me to ask around about your girlfriend? Gemma?”
“God, no. Gemma’s on that all on her own. Just let me know how it turns out with Worster.”
“If I find him.”
So now Lang was heading east toward the mountains, driving down a corridor with tall Douglas firs on either side, waving limbs dashing rain at his window in fits. It was less stormy than yesterday, but that wasn’t saying a hell of a lot. Eleven o’clock in the morning, and threatening clouds made it feel like night was approaching.
Tim Rooney was right, Lang realized as the road opened up to the Foothillers’ community’s sloping fields and gravel streets, which formed squares, the residences built like 1950s ramblers on block after block, some of them having been updated and remodeled, improved and/or bastardized depending on your way of thinking.
Lang first drove by the address Rooney had given him and saw that the place looked abandoned. Weeds had grown up in the drive, which was two ruts dug through gravel. No one answered his knock on the front door, and when he walked around the back, it was more of the same. He glanced around the area, but there was an overall feeling of desertion along the whole block. Maybe they were at work. Maybe there was simply no one around.
He drove around some more and came to what could be considered the main drag. There was a pharmacy, of sorts, that doubled as a liquor store. In Oregon, hard liquor was regulated by the Oregon Liquor Control Commission, the OLCC, and was only available at businesses with a proper license. But beer and wine were available a
t any grocery store, and down the street could be purchased at a general store that sported an honest-to-goodness hitching post in front. It was more for show than anything else as trucks, smaller pickups, and a few older-model American cars vied for space every which way in front of the place. He could hear music coming from the back, some shitkicker country song that he couldn’t make out the words, only the mournful tone of loss in the man’s warbling voice. Though he wore cowboy boots as a habitual part of his dress code since he’d left the department, country music wasn’t Lang’s thing. He knew a few crossover artists who’d managed to find their way to pop music, but even there he was iffy. So, though he half-looked the part as he strode through the general store that occupied the front of the building, then past the café in between, and finally into the tavern at the rear, he was definitely a fish out of water.
Especially when about a dozen Native American faces turned his way, regarding him with serious suspicion. And he didn’t think that was wine or beer being served up in old-fashioned glasses, though the bartender did an admirable job of sleight of hand, switching out beers for whiskey and bourbon.
“What can I do you for?” the bartender asked him. He wore a black shirt and faded blue jeans and cowboy boots.
Lang didn’t waste time trying to win their allegiance. They looked at him like he was the enemy, so no amount of bullshitting was going to lower their defenses. “I’m looking for someone who may be able to help solve a homicide.”
“Homicide.” One of the men, whose hair was short, a thick, steel gray, and whose face was as weathered and red-hued as pine bark, straightened in his chair. He sat at a small table near the back door with a younger man.
“A man was knifed to death at a rest stop off Highway 26.”
“Who you lookin’ for, boy?” This from a man who couldn’t have been much older than Lang himself. He wore a lumberjack’s plaid flannel shirt and jeans that looked like they’d been outside working since the day they were sewn. His boots were mud-caked and came up nearly to his knees.
“Cade Worster.”
“Cade!” The first man shook his gray head. “Well, you won’t find him, that’s for sure. He don’t stay in one place long enough to leave tracks. But he ain’t your man, if that’s what you’re thinkin’. He’s a thief, for sure. But he ain’t no killer.”
“He coulda killed somebody by mistake, Gordon,” the second man said to the first. “If he got caught stealin’ from ’em, and they caught him at it.”
“It doesn’t appear to be that,” Lang said. “Looks like Cade stole a truck from a farmer in Tillamook.”
“Rooney?” Gordon asked.
Lang was surprised they knew so much. “Rooney says Cade took his truck about a year ago. Cade might not be the killer, but could he be the victim?”
“Cade? No.” The second man shook his head. “He was walkin’ around yesterday.”
“Walkin’, ’cause he sold that pile of shit to his cousin.” The younger man sitting with Gordon spoke up for the first time.
“Cade sold Rooney’s truck?” Lang asked.
Gordon said, “Well, it ain’t really a sale. He loaned it to him.”
The second man said, “Well, it ain’t really a loan ’cause it wasn’t his truck in the first place.”
“Who’s this cousin?” Lang asked.
“You with the sheriff’s department?” the younger man asked. “You don’t dress like you are.”
“I’ve taken a job with them,” Lang said. “Haven’t got the dress code down yet. Who’s Cade’s cousin?”
“Rafe.” Gordon shook his head. “Rafe Black Bear.”
“Rafe’s father was a fuckin’ asshole, rest his soul.” The second man looked back at Gordon, who nodded soberly.
“Killed hisself by mistake,” Gordon said. “Got drunk, got a little too friendly with Tommy-John’s widow, got shot in the heart with a twenty-two.”
“Suicide by stupidity,” the younger man said. “You can check with the sheriff. Happened a coupla years ago.”
“I’m more interested in Rafe,” Lang said. “Has anyone seen him around lately?”
They all looked at each other, but no one answered. Lang could see the realization dawn on them.
“Not Rafe.” The younger man stood up sharply, knocking the table with his knee.
“I have a picture of the victim in my truck,” Lang said. “Could one of you look at it and see if it’s Rafe?”
“Cade’s his next of kin,” Gordon said. “Let him do it.”
“I don’t know where Cade is,” Lang responded.
“He’s at home. We just didn’t know you, so we didn’t want to give him up,” the second man said. “You need the address?”
“I was just there,” Lang protested. “There’s nobody home.”
“He’s there. Go talk to him.” Gordon motioned for Lang to go back out the way he’d come in. “And remind Sheriff O’Halloran, when you see him, that Cade’s a good man. Don’t wanna keep him locked up too long.”
Lang walked back through the café and the general store and into watery sunshine filtering through fast-drifting clouds. For the first time in days there was a break in the rain. Maybe that meant something.
Friday morning. Appointments till noon, then nothing. Claire’s attention was shot and it was harder than normal to listen to her outpatient clientele regale her with their fears, concerns, and general discontent. Mostly she was in the moment. Today she felt like she was on another planet.
Jamie Lou Breene was her last appointment, and she looked far worse for wear than she had at their last meeting. There was a bruise on her cheek that was turning green and yellow, and her hair was unwashed and lank.
“What happened?” Claire asked straight out.
“I got arrested!”
“Oh, Jamie Lou, why didn’t you call me?”
“I called Barry, okay? He came and got me.” She closed her eyes and looked like she was going to cry.
Then she proceeded to tell Claire a story of how John, her current lover, had left her for someone younger with fake boobs, and how she’d kicked the little whore in her big butt, and how she’d then stolen John’s car and ended up being chased down by the police, landing in the Clackamas County jail. Barry was Jamie Lou’s ex, and she was lucky he’d come to her rescue, which Claire told her in no uncertain terms.
“Barry only cares about himself,” Jamie Lou said. “I was at the jail for hours before he showed. Look at me. He kicked me out of the house!”
Claire said, “He’s your ex-husband. You don’t live with him. You’re lucky to have him in your life at all, tenuous as the bond is.”
“You always take his side. Always!”
“Someday you are going to have to take responsibility for your own actions, Jamie Lou.”
“What was I supposed to do? John was banging this stupid whore the whole time we were together. I just wanted to kill her.” She started weeping violently.
“Jamie Lou, we’ve talked about this. It’s a pattern, one you don’t want to break, or even recognize. You like being a victim. And you like being the center of attention to the point of self-destruction. That’s what you’re looking for. It’s what you’re always looking for. John is only your latest means to star yourself in the Jamie Lou show.”
Although Claire’s diagnosis was really nothing new, it was the first time she’d been so final. To date, she’d led Jamie Lou down paths of self-recognition, trying to elicit her own words of ownership to her misdeeds. To date, that hadn’t worked worth a damn, and Claire’s patience, usually so long, was gone.
“I love John,” she said stubbornly.
“You physically fought with a woman he was seeing, stole his car, and ended up in jail.”
“I’m saying I love him!”
Claire inclined her head. “Do you think we’re making progress together? Are these sessions helping you?”
“No! You’re just like the rest of them.”
“I’d lik
e to help you, Jamie Lou. I really would. But you enjoy making me part of the problem as well.”
“Well, then, let’s quit this. How about that?”
“The object of these sessions is to help you change your self-destructive behavior, but you make your therapist part of the process. There’s you, there’s the current lover who eventually leaves you for someone else, and there’s me.”
“We can quit right now.”
Claire gazed at her for long moments, assessing her sincerity. With Jamie Lou, it was hard to tell. Finally she said, “We’ll make another appointment. Stay away from John and men like him. Don’t rely on your ex-husband. How’s your job?”
She worked at a grocery store in the Salem area and had managed to hang on to it throughout her trials, mainly because the manager was a recovering alcoholic who had taken her on as a personal mission.
“I’m still working.”
“Good. Stay on your meds. Next time we’ll see.”
“You’re a hard-hearted bitch,” she declared.
“So I’ve been told,” Claire said dryly. “Go do something positive, Jamie Lou. Start putting one foot in front of the other.”
There was no one at Cade Worster’s abode; it was just as abandoned as it had been earlier. Lang climbed back in his Dodge and fiddled with the truck’s radio, finally finding a station that came in with bang-up clarity, though it was country-western.
He wondered if he’d been shined on by the men in the bar. He’d got the sense they were playing with him a little, but that was okay. Part of the game. But he didn’t think they’d completely led him wrong. If Rafe Black Bear was the dead man, and he was Cade’s cousin, then Lang needed more than an identification anyway. He needed background on Rafe, maybe a clue to who blond Cat was.
Still…an hour went by. Lang watched a hawk glide by overhead and land on a post at the far end of the block. Beyond was a field with a house on the far side, maybe several. He suspected there were more houses buried inside the massive tangles of Scotch broom that rimmed the west end of the field, running parallel to the coastline, but it was hard to tell as the hardy plant was greedily taking over the farmland as fast as it could. If somebody didn’t root it out, and soon, there would be little land for planting left, if that’s what the Foothillers used it for.