“Both are good causes.”
He turned troubled eyes on me. “I know. But I understand what the GreenLand Conservancy is saying. If we develop all our open land, we’ll end up looking like Los Angeles or San Jose—all concrete and shopping malls. What kind of legacy is that for the next generation?”
“I guess none of that matters when your child is dying.”
“I guess not.” He drew in a deep breath. “I don’t know what to do now that I’ll have the responsibility of the land. Either way I’m going to look like a jerk. Nora had already told the hospital and AIDS hospice they could expect big donations. And now that the decision is mine, I’m not so sure that Peter and my beliefs are the right ones. Even if one child’s life was saved because of the equipment that money could buy . . .” He cradled his head in his hands.
“You don’t have to make a decision right away, do you?”
He shook his head. “No, but everyone’s pulling at me. The lawyers are going to try and rush this through probate so I can make my decision. There’s no way I can afford the taxes, so I’ll either have to sell it or donate it to the conservancy.” He stood up and slung his guitar over his shoulder. “I can’t talk about this anymore. If you hear anything, let me know.”
“Sure,” I said, watching him walk down the mission steps toward the bridge.
I started walking myself, my thoughts a confused jumble. The words common good kept repeating in my head. Both things in this situation were for the common good. So which one was more worthy? Deep in my gut the thought of Bonita Peak being turned into an upper-middle-class housing project made me sick. But what about the suffering of people still alive? If I knew the money went toward saving the lives of accident victims or making the last days of children with AIDS easier, would I be able to overcome my distaste over seeing more of San Celina’s pristine open land turned into stucco houses? And what about my stand on personal-property rights? Didn’t Nora have the right to make that decision? Wouldn’t I give up the ranch, even everything I owned, to save Gabe’s or Dove’s or Daddy’s life? I loved our land, but I loved the people in my life more. Personal rights versus common good. Where does one draw the line?
A small practical voice added, That certainly adds more people to the list of who would want Nora dead. How far was Peter willing to go to make sure Bonita Peak was saved? I was pretty sure that Nick would be an easy person to sway in the conservancy’s direction, especially when he was feeling this vulnerable. And though I hated to admit it, it certainly made Nick’s position as a suspect more viable—at least in the police’s eyes. After what happened to us in Kansas, I’d come to learn a fine line separated love and hate and how very easy it was to slip, just a split second, over that line. And a split second is all it takes to kill someone.
Before I realized it I found myself in front of Eudora’s. A cup of strong coffee was what I needed right now. There were more immediate problems waiting for me on my own personal home front.
It was a busy night at the cafe. Monday evening was officially “group” night, when local writing, music, and artists’ groups received half off all coffee drinks in an effort to persuade them to hold their meetings at Eudora’s. Though many groups steadfastly continued to meet at Blind Harry’s, the basement coffeehouse could only hold so many, and Eudora’s had successfully acquired the overflow.
From the Elvis room came the raucous sound of bongos, harmonicas, and a cheery fiddle, much too upbeat for my present mood, so I took my cup of plain old coffee into the quieter though just as crowded Faulkner room. In one corner a group of senior citizens were energetically critiquing someone’s tongue-in-cheek poem, “Ode to a Grecian Goat.”
Finding no unoccupied tables, I started back out when someone called my name. The pushy tone made me shut my eyes briefly and wonder if I could successfully ignore it, claiming the noise had made it impossible to hear.
“Harper, I know you hear me,” the scratchy voice called. “Get over here. I want to talk to you.”
I reluctantly turned around. He was sitting in a small corner table surveying the crowded room like a self-satisfied potentate of a small but powerful nation. To the world “he” was William Henry Hedges, owner, publisher, and paper-clip counter at the Central Coast Freedom Press. To me, he was plain old Will Henry, acquaintance and general irritant since sixth grade.
In school, all the way through our junior year of college, when he transferred to UC Berkeley, Will Henry had been thin as a metal fence post, with elbows and knees as knobby as a old cow’s. He’d sprawl in the back of classrooms, his feral smile in place, and make fun of whoever didn’t believe the way he did at that particular moment. Radical when it was chic, he’d softened both physically and politically as he’d aged. Back in the seventies, his clothing preference ran to musty-smelling Mexican serapes, bell-bottomed jeans covered with peace signs, and those thick tire-tread-soled sandals. Now he carried a tight potbelly that hung slightly over his artificially faded jeans and had replaced his serape with a tweedy jacket. He wore expensive Birkenstock sandals, and though his hair was still long, I knew for a fact it was regularly cut and styled by Elvia’s brother Miguel’s girlfriend at the mall. A gold dagger-shaped earring glinted from one ear. Still wild enough to shock a few old grandmas.
With his sandaled foot, he pushed out the chair across from him and gestured for me to take a seat.
“Always the consummate gentleman,” I said. “What do you want?”
He frowned and pushed the chair with his foot again. “Shit, Harper, sit down for a minute and quit gawking at me like I just French-kissed your grandma. There’s something I need to tell you.”
“With a gracious invitation like that, how can I resist?” I remained standing and sipped my coffee. “Will Henry, I’m busy. So what is it?”
He stood up and pulled the chair out, running his tongue nervously over his wide-gapped teeth. “Benni, just give me a minute, okay?” He bent closer and whispered, “I have some information for Gabe, but I don’t want to go in to the station.”
That got my attention, just as he knew it would. I sat on the edge of the chair, setting my drink and purse on the table. “What information?”
“You want anything? A cappuccino? A muffin? It’s on me.”
“Just tell me what you want to tell Gabe.”
He sat back in his chair and folded his hands across his hard little belly, his wolfish expression returning. “Who shoved a branding iron up your butt, Harper? Why are you treating me like this? I haven’t trashed ranchers in months. And didn’t I do that article pointing out to all the veg-heads how many animal products they used without even knowing it?”
I felt the back of my teeth tighten. He knew why he rubbed me the wrong way, but I wasn’t about to get into it with him here at Eudora’s. We’d been on the outs ever since he wrote about the methamphetamine lab that had been found on Daddy’s best friend’s ranch last year. It had been booby-trapped, and the trip wire the horse stumbled over caused one of their ranch hands to be thrown and shatter his collarbone. The horse had broken his leg and had to be shot. Not to mention that after the police busted the lab, the cleanup was the financial and legal responsibility of the landowners. Living on the edge like most ranchers did these days, it almost drove them into bankruptcy. Will Henry’s paper only moaned about how much tax dollars the bust cost and complained that if all drugs were legalized, then things like this wouldn’t happen. Not one word about the victimization of the innocent rancher.
“If you don’t spit it out in the next minute, I’m outta here.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, sitting forward. The gray in his shaggy hair appeared yellow in the pale cafe lighting. “You have to promise that I won’t be dragged into this.”
I frowned. “You know I can’t promise that. Maybe you should be talking to Gabe if it’s that serious.”
“I just don’t want people to get the wrong idea. I don’t want my reputation ruined.”
“What reputatio
n? Will Henry, everyone thinks you’re a mouthy jerk who’ll do anything to sell newspapers.”
His soft cheeks pulled in at my comment, and for a moment I regretted my words. I didn’t like deliberately hurting someone’s feelings, but there was something about Will Henry that made me want to bite before I was bitten.
“People think I’m a jerk?” he said, his voice a bit sad.
“Please,” I said, sighing deeply. “I’m tired. Could you just tell me what it is you want to tell Gabe?”
“I want to go on record that it wasn’t my idea . . . entirely. The concept was mine, but she did it.”
I felt like throwing my coffee at him. “Quit talking in circles.”
He leaned forward and whispered, “Nora was the Tattler.”
“What?”
“I said—”
“I heard what you said. I’m just ... shocked. She wrote all that hateful stuff? How . . . why . . . ?”
“I edited it, but she gathered the information and wrote the column. That woman was incredible. Between working at the library and all the festivals and other things she was involved with, she knew more dirt about people in this town than the priests down at St. Celine’s Catholic Church.”
“What possessed you to even start a column like the Tattler?”
“We came up with the idea one evening when she was dropping off her art column. We were drinking tequila and talking about how phony people were, how politicians and public officials were such liars. It started out by being something where we could right some wrongs, hold people responsible for their actions, you know? But with a sense of humor. Sort of a Doonesbury kind of thing. Then she really got into it and started getting juicy stuff on lots of people besides politicians and government people, and, I don’t know, it just sort of snowballed into seeing how far we could push the envelope.”
“But why would she do that?” I turned accusing eyes on him. “Why would you?”
“Shit, I don’t know why she did it. Maybe after all the pain she’d been through she just wanted to inflict a little of her own. A lot of people weren’t very kind when her kid was dying. She did have scruples. She’d never let anything bad be said about nurses. She said they were the only ones who stuck by her while her kid was sick. But I did it for the pure and simple reason it sold papers. Circulation tripled when we started the column. Advertisers were willing to pay anything just to get on the same page as the Tattler. I was close to bankruptcy when we started running the Tattler, and we’re making a profit now. A good profit.”
“That’s disgusting,” I said.
He shrugged. “That’s business.”
“What about principles?”
“Principles are a lie perpetuated by the bourgeois in an attempt to keep the proletariat from getting ahead.”
I stood up and picked up my coffee. “That’s pretty ironic coming from a successful member of the merchant class himself. Tell me, when was the last time you actually had to get up off your fat butt and work manual labor to bring in the beans? I’ll let Gabe know what you told me. What happens after that is up to him.”
“Question for you, Miss Smart-Ass Harper,” he said. “How many times have you missed reading the Tattler?” He gave me a close-lipped smile.
I whipped around and strode out of the room, glad my hair had grown long enough to hide the red I was certain colored my neck as well as my face. He was right. I wasn’t any better than Nora and him. The readers of trash are just as responsible as the writers. A column like that could have died a quick death if we’d all protested it when it came out by not reading and discussing it as much as we did. Why was that so hard to do?
On the drive home I mulled over the information I’d received from Nick and Will Henry. I was a bit annoyed at Gabe for not telling me about Nora owning the disputed land. What would it have hurt for him to tell me that? With so much at stake, that put a whole new spin on things and opened the murder suspect list to a much larger group of people. The fact that she was the Tattler increased it even more. I’d forgotten to ask Will Henry if anyone else knew that Nora was the Tattler, but I assumed that no one did. The identity of the columnist had been a popular coffeehouse topic since the column started. Everyone had assumed that Will Henry himself wrote the column—it had the sort of sarcastic tone he was known for—but he’d sworn up and down that he wasn’t the author. Now I, for one, knew that was true. I also couldn’t help but wonder what was in this week’s column. I wished I’d kept my cool long enough to ask Will Henry.
When I arrived home, it was obvious that more than the discussion of Nora’s secret identity was on the activity chart tonight. Parked behind Gabe’s Corvette was one of the brown Ramsey Ranch trucks. I looked in my rearview mirror as I pulled in front of the house in time to see my red pickup pull in behind me. Sam waved cheerily from behind the wheel while Rita stretched her head out the window to gaze in the side mirror and poke at her hair. She left with Ash and returned with my stepson. I’m not sure I wanted to know the story behind that. I laid my head on the steering wheel, wondering briefly just who was being delivered by the Ramsey truck, what new things Gabe and his son could fight about tonight, when in the world Rita would leave, and just for a second, how long it would take me to drive to Atlanta, Georgia.
8
“SHE CHEATS!” DOVE was saying indignantly when I walked in the living room. I’d left Sam and Rita to wander in on their own, hoping I’d have a few minutes to put out one fire before another started. And this fire was a big one. The last time Dove was this mad was when she caught a group of hunters tramping around our land without permission. Lucky for us, this time she didn’t have a loaded shotgun in her hands. Gabe, his tie undone and a bottle of Coke in his hand, listened with a combined expression of sympathy and panic. His face brightened when he saw me.
“My own sister,” Dove sputtered. “A Christian woman. President of the Women’s Missionary Union. I’m here to tell you I’m downright shocked. I confronted her, just like the Bible says to, and what does she do? She denies it! Lying! She adds lying to cheating. Lord have mercy. My sister the liar and cheat.” Dove paced back and forth in front of the sofa, her normally pale complexion pink as a hothouse rose.
“I’m sure she didn’t realize—” Gabe started.
“The heck she didn’t!” Dove spun around and shook her finger at me. “I’m staying here until she apologizes or goes home. I’ll tell you what’s going to freeze over before I ever play dominoes with that woman again.”
“Dominoes?” I squeaked. “That’s what this is about?”
Dove crossed her arms over her ample chest. “I always knew she was the one in the family who got Uncle Hooter’s weak genes. He was a gambler and a womanizer till the day they planted his no-good carcass in the ground.”
“What did Aunt Garnet actually do?” I asked.
Dove enunciated her words carefully, as if she were talking to a very slow child. “She . . . cheated.” She gave a disgusted “hmmph.” “And for matchsticks. For heaven’s sake, what in the world did she care about winning a stack of matchsticks? What in the heck did she think she’d do with them, build the biggest bonfire in Sugartree? She’s going senile, that’s got to be the answer. That, or she’s as crazy as I always knew she was.”
I looked over at Gabe, who by this time wasn’t holding back the grin that had started in his eyes and worked down to his mouth. I gave him a hard look. This might be funny to him, but apparently he had missed the part where Dove said she was staying here until Garnet apologized. There was one thing he didn’t realize about Dove and her sister—neither one of them apologized. Ever. For anything. Before I could answer, Sam and Rita came in.
“Who’s crazy?” Sam asked. He looked over at Dove with interest, flashing his most endearing smile. “Not this lovely lady, I’m sure.”
Dove smiled back at Sam. “You must be Gabe’s son. I heard you was here visiting. My, you are a fine-looking young man.”
He bowed slightly. “Tha
nk you, ma’am. I owe everything I am to my gracious and beautiful mother and upright and hardworking father.”
Dove looked at me and winked. “He’s certainly the little charmer, isn’t he?” She glanced over at Rita. “What in heaven’s name are you doing here? That nasty ole cowboy finally get fed up with you?”
Rita tossed her head and sniffed daintily. “I left him. As a matter of fact, Ash took me to see a lawyer today who told me it was definitely a case of irresponsible differences.”
“He got that right,” Dove said with a harsh cackle. Gabe turned his head, trying to hold back his laughter. I didn’t even try to stifle the laugh gurgling up from my chest. You had to love Rita. Sometimes she could drive a post into the ground with one swing.
Rita turned and glared at me. “It’s not funny. I wish everyone would realize I’m in real pain here.” She pushed past us and ran to the guest bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
“I’ll go talk to her,” Dove said, picking up her large flowered suitcase. “We’re going to be bunking together anyway, so I may as well get her feathers smoothed down.”
“Wait a minute, we need to talk about this thing between you and Garnet. What exactly—”
Dove patted my shoulder as she passed me. “It’s gettin’ late, honeybun, and I’m tired. Breakfast is at seven-thirty.”
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