2 Landscape in Scarlet

by Melanie Jackson

  “I like the orange ones. Or lemon. Or chocolate.”

  In other words, anything would be an improvement on what they had just been through.

  Chapter 9

  He just wanted to know whom he had pissed off to get sent on this errand. Leaning on an old retired artist, even if the word was that she was scary because of having some kind of second sight, just wasn’t his style.

  He hadn’t asked questions though. They weren’t welcome and wouldn’t be answered. But he still really wondered who had gotten him assigned this detail. He went after bad guys, dangerous guys who hunted the streets of Los Angeles, not little old ladies who probably responded better to tact than threats.

  White Oaks. It wasn’t cataclysmically awful, he guessed, peering out the window as he looked for the road that led to the artists’ compound called Bartholomew’s Wood. It was the kind of place where the salon still did an authentic Jackie O hairdo and where they had meatloaf with catsup and baked beans at the diner. It was the kind of town that had petered out all over the world and no one was really sorry when they went.

  And absolutely nothing about the place or the people was going to lead to career advancement.

  Still, sometimes you just did what you were told. And the sooner he finished, the sooner he could get back to doing real work.

  It was high noon, but because of the clouds the world had shadows and Marley was playing in them. The encroaching air was humid and barbed with cold that reeked of the ocean and something less pleasant. Usually it smelled of pine and cedar but someone was tanning leather. The whiffs of dead animal were repellant and overpowered the cup of coffee she had made with her new Keurig. The old coffee machine had gone from quirky to moody and dangerous. She didn’t believe in keeping subversive appliances that could start fires.

  Juliet stepped outside to call Marley in so she could close up the bungalow.

  “Mar—Oh no.”

  Juliet believed in bringing food on a visit. It was a shortcut to convivial interaction and the breaking of bread was a symbol of peaceful intention.

  The strange man approaching her cottage on the narrow trail from the compound’s second tier of cabins was empty-handed. Looking at his utilitarian suit and shoes that fashion for the last fifty years had completely bypassed, Juliet made an intuitive leap and immediately fled up the hill for Esteban’s bungalow, dumping her cup along the way and cutting through the trees and risking ticks and sprains because it was fastest and the most hidden escape route.

  Esteban wasn’t home, but she knew where he kept the spare key and a set of high-resolution binoculars. And guns. But she didn’t need guns. Probably.

  Her panting breaths fogged the air around her as she scrambled up the hill. Juliet was fully aware that intuition had slammed the door on manners and even reason. The visitor, who dressed like some kind of Fed, might be selling Avon, or wanting to find out if she’d accepted Jesus as her Lord and Savior. He could be someone’s cousin from Iowa, or a repairman, or a visiting botanist.

  Only he wasn’t. She’d stake her life on it. He was the ligature that would try to pull her past and future back together—and her wishes would be less important to him than his selection of fast food that he’d eat on the way home.

  Part of her brain was making cognitive arguments against impulsive action but anger, so rarely in charge, was not listening to logical updates. She didn’t like that her self-made witness protection program was being invaded and alarm bells were ringing.

  She wasn’t frightened of the gray suit. Not exactly. But he was a facsimile of the men who came from her old life and was an unwelcome harbinger of a future one that she didn’t want. A future that brought on panic when contemplated.

  Juliet ripped her feet free of the mountain misery that clutched them and clawed her way over a boulder. Thank goodness she was wearing athletic shoes and not riding boots.

  She should have known! Should have guessed that, after Jerome Pinter’s call the week before asking how she was enjoying retirement, there would be follow-up. There always was. Sound even a little bit interested and encouraging and they sent someone. Sound very uninterested and discouraging, which she had, they still sent someone. Because “no” wasn’t part of the NSA’s working vocabulary, and the agency was accustomed to exploring the outer limits of what was legal and ethical.

  And she knew what sneaky Jerome was thinking. Retirement was for people over sixty-five. Everyone else—of value—was supposed to lash themselves to the wheel of the ship of state and sail on, regardless of personal needs or desires. Their lives were not their own once they signed on. Body and soul, you belonged to the agency. Her boss’s last act had been signing the papers that let her go, with a full pardon and her own soul, out the door at fifty and with her pension in place to draw on when she was sixty-five.

  Jerome was trying to bring her back. He was not compassionate and didn’t understand that she had had to leave. That she would probably have swallowed a gun if she had stayed.

  Besides, the intrusion couldn’t come at a worse time. She had never been good at dividing her attention and she had a killer to catch.

  Jerry Hill was on his patio as she scrambled out of the bushes. He was a little startled to see his neighbor with a smudged face and sticks in her hair, but he only nodded when Juliet hissed, “You haven’t seen me!”

  “I haven’t?” He followed half-heartedly as she went to Esteban’s cottage and fetched the key from out of the bone birdhouse by the door. Juliet didn’t like sticking her fingers inside because, she told herself, there could be spiders. But truly she didn’t like it because it was bones and touching the remains of dead animals was off-putting.

  Esteban knew this and figured his key was safe.

  “I have an unwanted visitor,” Juliet explained. Then, inspired, she added, “It’s my ex. Sometimes he’s violent. It would be better to avoid him. If he doesn’t leave I’ll call the sheriff.”

  Jerry’s eyes were big but he nodded again at this lie. Juliet slipped inside, relocked the door, and went to the desk where Esteban kept his binoculars.

  It took ten minutes, but the man in the bad suit with graying blond hair finally made it up the trail. Marley was following him, curious about the stranger who had come to his house and maybe amused by the way he kept plucking stickers from his pants.

  Jerry had disappeared inside his bungalow and Juliet was betting he wouldn’t answer the door. She wouldn’t be answering any doors either.

  The jangle of the old crank phone was loud and made her jump. Everyone knew Esteban was away, so the only one who would be calling on the internal system was someone who had seen the man and guessed that she might be hiding there to avoid him. Someone who knew that her cell could be monitored. Raphael.

  “Hello.”

  “You made it to sanctuary.”

  “Yes. Did he introduce himself to you?”

  “Peter Davis, an old friend from back east. No badges were offered.”

  “Uh-huh. Look, he’s here now. I’ve got to go.”

  “I’ll call when he leaves the parking lot,” Raphael said. “If it’s early enough we can have lunch and vilify your former employers.”

  “From your lips….” Juliet hung up the phone and stepped out of view of any of the windows. Fortunately Esteban made a habit in sitting in places that were out of the line of sight and using blackout drapes on the largest ones in the studio, so she was not uncomfortable in her borrowed chair tucked in the corner of the darkened room.

  The knock on the door made her flinch, but she waited quietly for the man to give up and go away. It was too much to hope that he would depart forever, but she wasn’t mentally braced to speak to him right then. And the thought of explaining her presence in Esteban’s bungalow, when she knew it would go into a report, made her angry.

  The visit also forced her to acknowledge that she wasn’t completely at ease in her new life. A part of her was still looking back, waiting for the past to tap her on the shoul
der. She meant to recite her yoga mantra but found herself muttering a poem her father had taught her.

  The other day upon the stair

  I met a man who wasn’t there.

  He wasn’t there again today,

  O, how I wish he’d go away.

  Except the last line kept coming out as “He must be in the NSA.”

  Abandoning recitation, she used invective instead. But softly. She didn’t much like having those words coming from her mouth, admitting that they had been inside, at her disposal for just such a moment.

  Even after the noise of someone circling the bungalow had ceased, she didn’t get up to look out of a window. Didn’t move when Marley scratched at the door. Patience, that’s what was needed.

  And it was rewarded some minutes later by the ringing of the compound’s internal phone.

  “Give me some good news.”

  “He’s gone,” Raphael said. “Bring the tuna and Marley, if he wants to come. I have the scotch and peanut butter cookies.”

  “See you in five.”

  Juliet hung up and opened the door for her annoyed cat.

  * * *

  “Any thoughts on why they are looking you up now?” Raphael asked, picking up a triangle of sandwich. Since it was a celebration—the avoidance of Juliet’s Nemesis—she had cut the sandwiches on the diagonal and added sweet pickles.

  “No. It isn’t like our parting was such sweet sorrow. Most people were glad to see me go. Still, I got a phone call last week from the weasel who wanted my boss’s old job. The guy is a real player. I should have known he’d send someone out when I didn’t jump at the chance to catch up on old times.” She frowned. “In fact, I bet he’s trying to take the job away from my boss’s replacement. I wonder if I should call.… No. Not getting involved. They can have this fight without me.”

  Juliet shook her head and leaned down to scratch Marley who was enjoying his tuna without bread or a side of scotch.

  “We’ve never spoken much about your actual job, but is it safe to say that you had some unique gifts that might make your shoes—or office function—hard to fill?”

  “Yes.” Juliet weighed her answers and finally settled on the simple one. “I’m very intuitive. Very good at seeing patterns and breaks in patterns and predicting future patterns. Mostly what I did was look at information, sometimes in the media, sometimes classified communications between agencies or other foreign entities, and found the … misinformation. Or disinformation. Then I figured out who was lying and why.”

  “You were a human lie detector.”

  “Except I didn’t work much with humans. Just their words.”

  “And what will you do if this man is persistent?”

  “It depends. I can call some friends—I had a couple—and see if they can call the dog off. He is probably wanting to solve some case for the sake of personal glory. I mean, if it were something straightforward he would just ask for help through the usual channels. If it were a known case, the guy who took over for my boss would have asked me to look at it.”

  “Option number two?”

  “I can always hit him over the head and bury his body in the woods.”

  Raphael looked amused.

  “Would that be wise? Bodies almost always get found eventually.”

  “Not if I hide them,” she muttered. “I bet I’d be a crackerjack killer.”

  “Doubtless. Do you want me to ask around about this guy?”

  “Not yet. I’m going to see if he has called in on Garret. I’m betting he hasn’t.”

  “I wouldn’t touch that bet,” Raphael said.

  “It’s so nice that you’re not stupid.”

  They smiled at each other and finished their sandwiches in silence.

  * * *

  Juliet knew she was taking a risk by going into town, but she was running low on tuna and she had a hungry cat to feed. There was also the urge to talk to Garret about the case and to tip him off about the stranger in town, if the sheriff wasn’t already aware that they had a spy in their midst.

  Though she expected the stranger to make some move once she was in town, it annoyed her to find him lying in wait behind a stand of privet about a dozen yards from the compound. He had been there for a while. The hood was decorated with needles and leaves. She didn’t recognize the make of car but it looked boxy and heavy. She could see his face in the mirror as he pulled in behind her and it was smug.

  The smile made Juliet see red. His car being heavy didn’t matter much on the dirt and gravel road, not the way it would on a freeway. She had the better vehicle for off-roading. The Subaru had all-wheel drive, was maneuverable, and knew its way around the mountains. It could practically drive itself.

  The slashes of sunlight between the trees would be blinding, and though he might know the road he’d driven in on, he didn’t know the smaller side paths and informal driveways where people would four-wheel drive in to visit their vacation shacks on weekends and holidays.

  The air in the canyon was disturbed by her passing, shaking the few remaining leaves from the colonnade of oaks that gave the town its name. There was no speed limit posted, but Juliet was sure that she was exceeding safe speeds. That meant her follower would have to exceed them too or give up.

  As expected, the gray man decided to play though a quick check in the mirror showed Juliet that his smile was gone. In fact, he looked a bit dismayed. He’d probably been told to look for a retired nerd and was expecting gray hair, a nervous disposition that was easily overawed, and perhaps a bag of knitting she hung off her cane. He had expected to be able to lean on her and have her cave immediately.

  Juliet took the next turn hot, skidding in the dirt and throwing mud and rock into the air. The Subaru protested but held to the track. Behind her she heard a scraping noise, but no fatal crunching. Her follower had hit shrubs, not trees.

  Too bad.

  It occurred to her that maybe she was overreacting, but this obnoxious stranger had her back up. And anyway, she was enjoying the small bit of vehicular recklessness. Their little chase was down payment on a lesson in manners which was likely never to be delivered in full since she had no intention of ever going back to Washington.

  But this man could be the surrogate, the whipping boy. She needed to get rid of him and to start spackling the cracks before her wall of privacy started eroding. Maybe a report about erratic behavior would keep them away. No one wanted to work with an insane operative.

  She flashed by the first geodesic dome covered in weathered shingles. There were two, the second painted up like a cupcake that had begun to look a little moldy with the encroaching moss marching up the walls. The road looked like it was veering left, but just over the crest it jogged right. Juliet waited to set up for it until the last minute, hoping dust might obscure her follower’s view.

  The other car had fallen back. That was fine. Juliet just needed enough of a lead to reach the auto dealership without being seen and she could park behind the shelter of the old frontier wall that enclosed the parking lot. If she moved fast enough, she could be out of the car and into the sheriff’s office before he turned onto the main—and only—street running through town.

  Fortunately the town was all but deserted, practically a ghost town, and Juliet was able to nip into the lot and find a space next to the wall and half-shrouded by oleander and yew. She was out of her car and up by the gate only seconds later. She peered around cautiously and finding her path clear, she dashed up to Garret’s office.

  There she met with a setback. Garret wasn’t in. She debated for about one second the merits of questioning Deputy Henderson and then decided that it wasn’t worth it.

  “Do you know where the sheriff is?”

  “I think he’s out by the stables. Or else down at the gallery.”

  The stables. Had he thought of something else he needed to investigate at the scene of the crime? Some fact they had overlooked the first time?

  “I’ll try and catch up with him
there.”

  The stables were closed and looking forlorn and as cold and damp as any building had ever been. Juliet turned the south corner and stopped short. There was no sign of Garret, but the gray man was there. The persistent bastard had headed right for the crime scene as if he knew that was where she would come.

  He had his back to her, facing a large stone. But it wasn’t likely he would contemplate the boulder for long. It was impressively large but a rock of limited fascination in other respects. And if he looked to the left he would see the repair shop and, from that angle, a glimpse of the back end of the muddy Subaru.

  He might have already done so and that was why he was waiting where he was.

  Juliet called Fate a lot of names in her head but then turned to duck behind the thick yew where the ravens still sat, living markers of the scene of a crime. They cawed sharply as she passed them and she heard the gray man spin around to search for the almost human voices.

  She waited just behind the yew, standing very still while his eyes traveled just above the spot where she hid. There was a softness to the ground under the trees where the shade was deep as twilight and rotting vegetation held the damp, but he might hear her footsteps crunching if she ran and that wouldn’t do. She wanted him to follow, but not right on her heels.

  That she was too old and too sensible to be running around without counting the cost did not occur to her. She was too gloriously angry.

  He took a step in her direction and then paused. He pulled a cell out of his pocket and looked at the screen and then back at her car.

  Had he installed some kind of tracking device on the Subaru?

  Juliet bared her teeth.

  He wanted to play dirty? So be it. Let the games begin.

  Chapter 10

  Her enthusiasm for the game of leading the gray man into the woods thick with ticks and animal droppings and other tiny traps of the great outdoors began to waver almost immediately. She was soon remembering that this was an organization that tended to see dissent as treason.