Ted followed him toward the cash register. “Callister’s a good place. There’s a few rotten apples everywhere. You’ve just happened to run into ours.”
They parted at the café’s front door. Doug drove the twelve miles from town to his house, trying to make sense of the past twenty-four hours and the revelation that life in this simple small town wasn’t so simple after all.
That evening, he saw no tiny specks of light on Wolf Mountain and wondered why. The following day, he debated about calling Alex and asking about her injury, but remembering how they had parted, he rejected the idea. Then he considered calling her and apologizing, but for what? All he had done was ask her to go out.
No lights appeared on the next two evenings either. Surely, she hadn’t gone on a business trip with her face battered and bruised. Since Ted must be feeding the cats, he would know where she was. Frustrated because he wasn't in that loop himself, Doug thought about calling Ted to see if he could finesse the information out of him.
Don’t be juvenile, he told himself and rejected that idea, too.
Chapter 17
On Tuesday morning, just after he finished his workout, Doug was surprised by a UPS delivery of a small but heavy brown package. He signed for it, preoccupied by the return address—Bynard's Antique Books, Boise, Idaho.
Opening it on his kitchen table, he found a stack of well-used small books. The shipment had to be an error. He had never heard of the Boise bookstore. He lifted out the top book. The cover appeared to be a fabric of some kind. He turned the book and read the spine: “The Winning of the West, Vol. I” by Theodore Roosevelt. He opened the cover to the title page, covered by aged, crisp onionskin. Lifting the delicate paper with care, he saw the publication date: 1905.
Five more like volumes, II through VI, lay in the box. He lifted them out and fanned the ivory pages of each one. A square envelope lay on the bottom of the box. He picked it up and found a folded note inside. He saw embossed initials in one corner—“AM.”
He knew the sender, even before he read the handwritten message:
Thanks for your friendship. Sincerely, Alex McGregor.
Doug did a one-eighty and looked out his kitchen window at the distant smudge against Wolf Mountain he now could spot as her home. He knew she was home. Her lights had reappeared last night. He crossed his arms over his chest while tried to comprehend the enigma who lived on Swede Creek.
His thoughts were a jumble. He had received presents from women many times, things like ties or sweaters he often didn’t like. He could think of few gifts, if any, that had called for deep thought on the part of the giver. How could she have known how much he would treasure so fine a gift?
His desire to call her outweighed his determination not to. He plucked the receiver from the wall phone and punched in her number, which for some arcane reason, he had memorized. He heard one burr before he made a different decision, hung up and headed for the shower.
****
At her house, he parked on the upper level at the front. She came around the corner of the deck clad in mud-crusted jeans and a loose dirt-smudged T-shirt. Her hair was swept back in a pony tail at her neck. She was carrying several tomatoes.
When she came closer, he saw that she wore no bra. Nipple impressions stood out like sculptured peaks against the white T-shirt and his eyes defied his gentlemanly intentions. He couldn’t deny that he was a breast man. “Hi,” he said, letting his eyes scan her from head to toe. “You mining for those tomatoes or what?”
She gave him an indulgent unsmiling look. “My garden.”
Her being a gardener was as far-fetched as her being the owner of a blue collar bar like Carlton’s, but as he learned more every day, nothing about her fit a conventional pattern. “No kidding. You grew ’em? Hey, cool.”
“I like growing things.”
“Where’d you learn how?”
Her sunglasses were absent. She looked up at him, a hand shading her eyes. “My grandmother. When I was a kid. It was survival training.”
The swelling in her cheek and eyelid had gone down. Now she had only a dark crescent beneath her lower lid to show for last Tuesday night’s set-to.
He glanced down at her lace-up walking boots. “Going hiking?”
She hesitated a few beats. “What do you want?”
“UPS delivered the books today. I came to say thank you.”
She looked up at him, her hand shading her eyes. Her eyes and the sky were the same clean color. “You’re welcome,” she said. “That means you’re thanking me for thanking you. I told you I always pay back.”
“Antique books are a pretty special payback for a small favor.”
She shrugged and began to rub dust off the tomatoes on her pants leg. “It’s no big deal. I saw them and I thought you might enjoy reading them. Ted told me you like old things with history.”
“I will, but even if I never get them read, I’ll still like owning them.” He gestured at her boots. “Where you hiking to?”
“Granite Pond.” She walked over and laid the tomatoes on the back deck.
His memory spun back to the morning she had delivered him to his truck in the grocery store parking lot. He couldn’t keep from being curious about Granite Pond. He followed her to the deck, picked a tomato up and examined it.
“It’s a short-season variety,” she said, eyeing him cautiously. “Nothing else will grow here. Don’t bruise it.”
He carefully placed the tomato back on the deck.“Listen, maybe I could go with you. After what you told me about that pond, I’d like to see it. And the walk would be good exercise for me.”
A chirp came from her jeans pocket and she pulled out a beeper. “I need to return this call first. Come inside if you like.” She turned and started up the deck steps and he followed, his gaze glued to the tight jeans hugging her ass with each step. Inside the front door, she made a left turn into the office.
He stopped in the doorway as she made her way to the desk. As interested as he was in everything about her, he still didn’t want to eavesdrop on her phone conversation.
“You can come in,” she said. “This is just some information I’m expecting from my assistant. It isn’t private.”
He stepped into the room. He hadn’t paid a lot of attention to the office the first time he was in it. He hadn’t had the chance because that night, all he had seen was Miller. The clean scent of furniture polish met him. There wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere. But plenty of books were shelved in two walls of floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Everything from reference books to text books, fiction varying from the classics to erotica. He envied the collection. “Who’s the reader?”
“I am.” She keyed a number into the phone on her desk and put the receiver against her ear. “I have no social life.”
Keeping his back turned, Doug grinned. As far as he could tell, Ted was the only person in town who didn’t dislike her.
While she talked on the phone, he tried, with only moderate success, to avoid glances at her chest and the sexy way her breasts shifted every time she moved her arms. He willed his eyes to the wall above a long credenza behind her desk, saw photographs and architectural renderings of hotels, apartment buildings, shopping centers. He recognized an Orange County mall. Interspersed among the pictures of buildings were photographs, old and new, of Alex with assorted dignitaries.
Most ego walls he had seen usually weren’t hidden in a private place where the outside world would never view them. He picked up a picture in a silver frame of her shaking hands with a former mayor of Los Angeles.
She hung up and came around the end of the desk. “What was this about?” Doug asked her, pointing to the photograph.
“Nothing much. He made a speech at a conference. Ready?”
“Sure.”
As they started out of the room, Doug spotted a mounted Dall ram’s head on the wall almost hidden behind the door. Besides being a rare trophy, it was an incredible specimen. How had he missed it when he had been h
ere before? Then he remembered she had switched off the lights, leaving him standing in the dark.
Below the goat’s head, he saw a gun cabinet. It held a .22 rifle, a couple of shotguns and a couple of 39.06 rifles, even some pistols. Hell, she had an arsenal. He recalled Ted saying how she sometimes entered the local turkey shoots, won the turkey, then gave it away. “Wow. Your husband must’ve been a pretty good hunter.”
“He was once, when he drank less. Where we grew up, everyone hunted. We had to.”
“Where’d he get this guy?”
“He didn’t. I did. It came from up on the Lochsa.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
She stopped and drilled him with a laser look. “About which part? That I shot it or where it came from?”
“The first part. I know where it came from.”
“Why would you ask that? You think a woman can’t shoot a goat?”
Doug envisioned the steep, rugged crags where mountain goats lived. “That’s not what I meant. I’m talking about where this particular sheep lives. I’m in pretty good shape and a hunt that rugged would be hard for me. I can’t imagine a woman even wanting to do it.”
“I had a guide. He did most of the work, at least for half the trip.”
“Half?”
“He hurt himself. He broke his foot.”
Knowing the hazards such an injury in a remote area would raise, Doug blinked in disbelief. “While you were hunting?”
“I already had the sheep.” She flipped a hand in the air. “It’s a long, boring story. I will say, though, the whole thing turned out to be the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life and I’ll never do it again.”
She headed through the living room. Doug threw one last glance at the bearded, snow-white trophy. “Don’t you have to draw a permit to hunt those?”
“I won the drawing. The permit wasn’t transferable. If I hadn’t gone on the hunt, it would have been wasted. I don’t believe in waste.”
A hundred questions danced around in Doug’s head. Why would she have even put in for the drawing in the first place? “Lemme see if I got this. You’re saying going on a grueling hunt most men would find challenging was purely a philosophical idea, based on not being wasteful?”
“I’m not saying anything at all. You asked about it.” She laughed. “You’re a total chauvinist. In all of Ted’s stories about you, I don’t think he mentioned that.”
“I’m not a chauvinist. I just believe men should be men and women should be women. The world’s more comfortable that way.”
Her brow arched. “Oh. So now you’re wondering what this smart-aleck woman was trying to prove, right? It was one of those survivalist things, like some people do when they’re diagnosed with a terrible disease. I didn’t have a terrible disease, but I had Charlie. At the time, challenging myself to something that left no room to be distracted helped me clear my head.”
Well, a man would never find life with her to be dull, Doug decided as they reached the outside. He had to know the whole story that went with the hunting trophy, but he would save it for later.
A long hill and an obvious foot trail began a few feet away from the back deck. She stared toward the top of it as if reluctant to start the climb. “I haven’t gone up there since Char—since the fire.”
Doug would have paid to know what was going on in her busy brain at that moment. Abruptly, she headed up the trail and he had to scramble to keep up. They were both breathing hard by the time they reached the top and a road.
“This is Old Ridge Road,” she said, as they stood in the middle of a rugged two-track. “I told you about it. It’s one of the issues Kenney and I are in disagreement about.”
Doug didn’t have to be a logger to see that logging trucks weren’t going to be able to travel on the narrow, rough road in its present condition. Making it usable would be no small road-building project. Understanding began to swarm in his head. He looked back toward Alex’s house and realized she might be able to see the traffic from her back door, but even if she couldn’t see it, she would certainly be able to hear it.
In front of them lay the small bowl that closed in the lower end of the creek, the pond and the waterfall that dumped into it. Even before they arrived, he had heard the rush of the waterfall. He remembered the sound from when he had come here with Cindy Evans.
In the noonday sun, the oval-shaped pond glittered like a diamond nestled in the tall dry grass and ferns that surrounded it. Off to the distant left and at the beginning of Wolf Mountain’s foothills was the pile of ashes and debris that had been the log cabin. Behind it rose a steep hill with burned tree trunks jutting from the charred earth, looking as if giant, black toothpicks had been poked into the ground. A sadness came over Doug. The glade had been unique and he had taken it for granted on his first visit. It would be years, if ever, before it returned to the same look.
Miraculously, the fire’s path had taken the flames away from the valley floor. The separation between the blackened hillside and the green grass and foliage on the banks of the pond and stream was as distinct as if someone had drawn a line. He looked down at Alex’s profile as she stared at the destruction. The uphill hike had made her cheeks rosy. Sunlight sifted through wispy tendrils of golden hair framing her face. She wore no jewelry except small, golden hoops in her ears. Now, up close and in daylight, he realized she had on little or no mascara. The dark thick eyelashes that framed her eyes were natural. Her lips shone with just a hint of color. She was one of the most striking naturally beautiful women he had ever seen.
A powerful urge seized him. He wanted to pull her into his arms, consume the sweetness he believed he would find in her mouth, run his hands under that T-shirt and touch those bare nipples that were turning him into a sex-crazed psychopath, but as much as he wanted to do those things, he wanted simply to know her in a way no one else seemed to.
Her gaze was fixed on the cabin ruins as if her mind was far away. She shook her head slowly. “It was so beautiful.” She looked up at him. “Didn’t you think so?”
“It still is if you can shut out the scene to the left.”
He glanced down at the steep slope ahead of them that met the valley floor. “Let me go first." He stepped in front of her, turned back and offered her his hand.
“I don’t need help. I’m up and down this slope all the time.”
“C’mon. It’ll be easier if you let me help you. Give me a chance to be a gentleman.” Slanting him a look of skepticism, she placed her hand in his. “Put your other hand on my shoulder,” he told her. Then, digging in his heels, he picked the way down the rocky decline.
Arriving at the bottom, her gaze circled the glade and came to rest on the cabin ruins again, unreadable emotion in her eyes. “There isn’t much left,” she said.
He was curious to get a second look at the cabin ruins in a setting less congested than the day of the fire. “Care if I take a look over there in those cabin ashes?”
She shook her head.
Not wanting to appear overanxious, he sauntered across the clearing to the foot of the hillside. He didn’t expect her to accompany him, but she followed a few steps behind. There had been no weather to change how the ruins had been left, though there was evidence of visits by predators and of course, the rescuers and fire fighters.
He walked around the perimeter of the ashes, picturing how the old structure had looked before the fire. It had been close to dark that night with Cindy and scrutiny of the cabin hadn’t been what was on his mind.
A few parts of logs from the walls were left. Scattered among the ashes were twisted bed springs, metal pieces from a reclining chair’s framework, a cast iron stove. It was scorched to a rusty red and looked misplaced standing on a brick hearth. It sat at an angle across what would have been a corner. Alex was right. Not much to see. “Where was the bed located?”
“Across the room from the woodstove.”
Doug measured the distance in his mind. He picked up
a stick, squatted and slipped it through the twisted remains of the lantern that had been named as the culprit. Lifting it a few inches and studying it, he recalled being told by a fire marshal once that metal collapsed at fifteen-hundred to eighteen-hundred degrees. “Real hot fire,” he said.
He looked closer, but saw nothing to indicate a body had lain in front of the hearth. “What’d they say was the cause of death?”
“Carbon monoxide poisoning. And massive thermal injuries,” she answered with no emotion. He looked up at her, squinting against the sun. With a vengeance, she was plucking the tufts from a plant of some kind.
“Did the autopsy say if they found soot in the upper airway, upper lungs?”
“I haven’t read it. What difference does it make? No matter what it says, Charlie’s just as dead.”
He had dealt with many liars and she was the worst. He assumed evading the truth was something she was uncomfortable doing. The answer to his question must be yes. Without a doubt, Charles McGregor did burn to death. “Right,” he said.
Knowing McGregor had been alive for some period while the cabin burned only elevated Doug’s curiosity. He remembered windows and a door. As small as the structure was, a window couldn’t have been more than a couple of feet from the hearth, the door no more than five or six feet from the bed. Was McGregor passed out drunk? Otherwise, why didn’t he get out?
You’re not a cop, so stay out of it,. he reminded himself again.
He dropped the stick and stood up, pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his hands. “Where was Cindy when you first saw her?”
Alex pointed toward a cluster of standing, blackened tree trunks across the meadow. “She ran out from the trees over there. She kept saying, ‘He’ll kill me.’” She turned her back on the ashes and started for the pond.
“Was she talking about your ex-husband?”
“I don’t know.” She turned her back on the ashes and started walking toward the pond. “If someone asked me if Charlie was a violent man, I’d say no. But at the same time, he was unpredictable when he was drunk. I think he’d reached the point where he was pickling brain cells faster than they could regenerate. That’s what happens with alcoholics, you know. It’s a type of dementia.”
The Love of a Stranger Page 18