“What’s your name?” she asked.
“My friends call me Bea.” That was a bit of a stretch. I didn’t have any friends, and the ones that I might have had certainly wouldn’t have called me Bea. It was the name I’d been using on my trek across country, when I had to have a name at all, but it was too close to a lie for my comfort, and it must have shown on my face.
Her eyes turned sharp and wary. “I have an aunt named Bea,” she said. “Well, Beatrice, really. She’s a little old roly-poly woman with blue hair and a wicked tongue.” Her smile was almost grim. “You don’t look like a Bea to me.”
I felt my face flushing and her eyes narrowed a little more. The line of her mouth grew thinner making the point of her chin look almost angular. I didn’t like it.
“It’s just what people call me,” I said. “Bea stands for the letter B, short for B.B. or Biker Babe.” It was the name that the gals in the motorcycle shop christened me with, hooting and whistling, the day I showed up in my leathers. I preferred it to my real name, but Meri, as in happy, kept looking at me with a sharp suspiciousness in her eyes. I really didn’t like it, and I wanted it to go away. I wiggled uncomfortably under the blue and white checkered quilt. What are you supposed to say when the truth is too scary to tell? I didn’t know, so I told her only part of the truth and hoped it would be enough.
“My name is Collier,” I told her with my arms folded tight across my chest. “But I don’t want to be called that. Please don’t ever call me that.”
Her eyes softened and her mouth eased at the corners. “Well, then, Biker Babe, I think you should get some rest now.” She gave my eyebrow one last dab with her towel and stood. She tugged at the quilt, straightening out the wrinkles, and tucked it in tight around my shoulders. “I’ll be in the room at end of hallway if you need anything. Just holler.” She left me then, closing the door gently behind her.
Meri rolled my bike off the trailer and into the empty stall next to the horse, whose name, she reminded me, was Sergeant. She wouldn’t let me help. I was stiff and sore all over, my head hurt, and the Band-Aids pulled, but even so, I felt much better, especially after getting pancakes for breakfast with fresh fruit, orange juice and real brewed coffee. A vast improvement over the sodas and granola bars that I’d been living on for the last three weeks. Gas stations rarely have anything edible in their vending machines.
Sergeant poked his head in through the side window and sniffed at the dangling mirror, his huge nostrils flaring wide. The mirror started swaying, and Sergeant’s eyes went big and round. He rolled his ears flat against his head. It looked so funny that I laughed. I shouldn’t have. It sent stabbing pains through my head. Meri looked up from where she was trying to get the bent kickstand to lock in to place.
“What’s funny?” she asked.
“Nothing really,” I said pressing a palm against my temple. “It is strange, though, if you think about it, that there’s twelve hundred horses sitting next to just one, and they both fit in the same size stall.” Sergeant snorted and tossed his head, obviously not appreciating the comparison. Meri gave the kickstand an extra hard jiggle and it snapped into place. She shoved a board underneath the foot and let the bike lean.
“Twelve hundred?” she asked. “That’s a powerful engine.” She dusted off her hands. “A light bike with a big engine. I bet it goes fast.”
“Very fast,” I said. “It’ll top two hundred, but if you do that, the wind will blow you right out of the seat. Last week I had it going one-twenty-five on a flat stretch in Kansas. That was scary enough for me.”
Meri tucked her hands into the front pockets of her blue jeans and frowned at the bike. “And why, exactly, did you need to go that fast?” The sharp look was back in her eyes, her face almost pinched with it.
I didn’t answer but walked around the bike, studying it critically. An air hose was loose and some wires were hanging. I tugged on them a little and then reached over to unlatch the seat. It swung open and I took the tool kit out from underneath. “Soonest started is soonest sung.”
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“It means that the sooner I start on these repairs, the sooner I can get out of your hair.” My words came out a little harder than I meant them, but I didn’t apologize. I chose a star bit screwdriver from the kit and, with a groan for all my aches and pains, sat down cross-legged in the hay. I began loosening the screws from around the engine guard, pointedly ignoring her. I didn’t care what she thought of me or the bike or the leather. I’d be leaving, tomorrow at the latest, tonight if I could. It didn’t matter to me what kind of judgmental conclusions she came to.
She stood very still for a while and then I heard her leave, feet shuffling softly through the hay until they hit the hard- packed dirt outside the barn door. My fingers fumbled and the screwdriver fell into my lap. I bent my head, scrubbing my hands through my hair. Who was I kidding? It was hard, not answering her questions. I wanted to tell her why I was going that fast. I wanted to tell her about the dark sedan with the California plates that kept appearing every time I got onto an interstate and about the two men with crew cuts and scary blank faces at the small diner in Texas and how I was too scared to stop for food after that. I wanted to tell her about the fear that chased me through four states in two days and how I ended up lost on a backcountry road in the middle of the night in the pouring rain. I wanted to tell her what her pancakes really meant to me. She helped me, and I wanted to tell her everything. She seemed so kind, but hard and strong in all the right places. I felt like it would be safe to tell her my secrets, but it wasn’t, and I couldn’t.
Sergeant blew a big horsy snort against the back of my head, stretched his neck over the side of his stall and leaned over me to nibble on the dangling mirror.
“Thanks,” I said, reaching to pat the underside of his jaw, “that’s very helpful.”
His teeth snapped and, with a sudden twist of his head, he ripped the mirror loose and dropped it into the hay. I looked down into it. A hollow-eyed, bruised and Band-Aided face stared back up at me. It was almost a stranger’s face. Sergeant’s nose appeared beside my ear. His lips curled over his big square teeth and he whinnied loud enough to make me jump. He sounded very pleased with himself.
The day was fading into late afternoon when Meri came into the barn with a pitchfork and a wheelbarrow full of hay. Sergeant nickered at her from outside the pasture window as she filled his bin. I stood slowly, my bones creaking, muscles stiff and sore. I stretched, lifting onto my toes, fingers reaching to the ceiling. Meri watched me out of the corner of her eye with a carefully composed face. She seemed to be thinking hard about something, and I hoped she wasn’t working herself up to demanding that I leave right away. I was having a bit of a problem with the bike.
“You didn’t come in for lunch,” she said between forkfuls of hay. “You must be starving.”
“No, not really.” I was too keyed up to think about eating. I wanted to finish and get out of there before she could ask me more questions that I couldn’t answer, before she could cut me all to pieces with her sharp eyes. But it wasn’t going to happen. I stared at the bike parts strewn across the barn floor.
She laid the pitchfork across the lip of the wheelbarrow and wheeled it into a corner. “How’s it going with the bike?” She hung the fork on a peg on the wall and came into my stall dusting off her hands against the legs of her jeans.
“The clutch pedal is bent.” I stooped with a grunt, picked it up off the ground and showed it to her.
She glanced at it and looked questioningly at me. “Is that bad?”
“Yes, it is.” I dropped it into the hay. It was worse than bad. It was useless. “For the clutch to work, all the gears have to mesh. With the pedal bent, the gears don’t fit together right, and they jam. This isn’t something I can fix with shoestring and bubble gum.” I poked a toe at it. “Not even with duct tape.” The remnants of a silver roll still hung from the foot peg.
Meri la
ughed and I looked up at her in surprise. I must have had a silly expression on my face because she laughed even harder. I grinned at her and shrugged, feeling suddenly shy of the twinkle in her eye.
She took in a sudden sharp breath and let it out with a puff of her cheeks. She gazed around the stall and then back at the bike. “Would you like some tea?” she asked. “Hot tea, I mean, not iced tea.”
“Uhm, sure. Tea would be nice.” I answered, still grinning a little. “Do I get crumpets too?”
She smiled and brushed a stray piece of hay off her jacket. “No, you can have scones, but only if you say please and thank you.”
It took me a second to realize she was teasing. Her expression was light and open, the smile sitting easily on her lips. It was a very different face from the one she was wearing earlier. I liked this one much better. It made me want to laugh.
I dropped her a mock curtsy. “Yes, please, and thank you. I’d be honored to join you for tea and scones.” I gestured at my dusty blue jeans. “Will you be requiring me to change? I’m afraid I didn’t bring any tea dresses.”
Her mouth slimmed into a half smile and she nodded almost imperceptibly as if somehow I had said exactly what she expected me to say. Her eyes rose to my hair and then roamed slowly down to my boots. “No, there’s no need for you to change. You’re fine the way you are.” She turned abruptly and walked with bouncy steps toward the house.
Something had changed, not a lot, but there was definitely something different. I watched her go, a little confused, but not unhappy to be that way. Whatever it was, it seemed like a good change. Sergeant poked his head in through the window and nudged me with his nose.
“All right,” I said to him over my shoulder. “There’s no need to get pushy. I’m going.”
In the kitchen, I washed my hands very carefully trying to get all the specks of grease out from under my nails. It would be rude to sit down to tea with dirty fingernails. I couldn’t do anything about looking like a Hell’s Angels reject, but I didn’t want her to think me uncouth. Meri lay out the tea and, true to her word, there were scones, fresh baked and still steaming hot. She poured tea into my mug, and the orangey smell of it made me sigh.
“Pekoe?” I asked wrapping my hands around the warmth. She nodded and passed me the sugar bowl. I spooned, stirred and took a grateful sip. It wasn’t until I was halfway through the cup and well into the third scone that I noticed the way she was watching me. Her expression was patient but expectant, like she was waiting for me to do or say something particular. I put the half-eaten scone back down on my plate.
“That clutch part, the one that’s bent, isn’t going to be easy to get,” I said to her.
She smiled and shrugged.
The beginnings of a frown pulled at my Band-Aids. “I’ll have to order it. It will probably take about a week to get here.”
She sipped her tea and stared at me, her funny eyes twinkling a lake-water blue over the rim of her mug. I frowned harder.
“If you don’t want me here that long, you can drive me to a motel or something. I can come back when the parts come in.”
She put her mug down on the table. “I don’t mind you staying here, Bea. As a matter of fact, I think you probably should. You need some time to rest and heal.”
I raised an eyebrow, the one that didn’t hurt so much.
“Your head.” She gestured. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you had a concussion, and if you won’t see a doctor, at least you shouldn’t be moving around too much. Besides, the nearest town of any size is over an hour away in the next valley. I don’t think they have a good enough hotel there anyway.”
“Good enough for what?” I asked. Her cheeks flushed a deep red. She shrugged slightly and touched a finger to the rim of her cup. Her eyes were much too bright. She was pleased about something, almost giddy, like maybe fortune had just dropped a golden egg right into her lap.
Maybe it had. My heart sank through the floor. “You know who I am.”
She nodded her head once. “Yes,” she said in a soft, contented whisper, a silly shy smile twitching at her lips. She leaned back in her chair. “I’m sorry it took me so long. I’m a little out of touch with the rest of the world. I don’t like television very much. I do have one, but it’s in the hall closet behind the winter coats. My Aunt Beatrice likes to watch television, though. She watches all the talk shows.” Her smile went all crooked and funny. “She says they’re all still talking about you.” She tipped her mug and looked into her tea. “You did look familiar to me, there in the barn, like I’d seen your picture somewhere before, but I was thinking it was from the wanted posters in the post office. It didn’t occur to me that it might be from a supermarket tabloid.” She swirled the tea around in her mug. “You can understand that, right? I mean, you did look pretty fierce with all that blood and torn leather ... in a frighteningly beautiful kind of way.” Her look was shy and hesitant.
I stared at her. Tea and scones and polite admiration. She was giving me what she thought I wanted, or what she thought I was used to, but she couldn’t have been more wrong. I kept staring at her with my teeth clenched together, my face set so tight that the Band-Aids pinched. The smile faded from her face and the silence grew between us. She began tapping her fingers against the side of her mug while I sat there and said nothing.
She sniffed and then cleared her throat. “I made your bed this morning.”
“And?”
“And I knocked your bags over,” she said looking at the table.
“On purpose?”
Her eyes flickered up, touched mine and then fell back down. “Not exactly on purpose. Not at first, anyway, but they fell and...” She shifted uncomfortably in her chair and then made a sharp, almost angry gesture with her hand. “Okay, fine. I dug through your bags on purpose. I’m sorry. I know it was an invasion, but you have to understand what it’s like to live alone. I had to make sure you weren’t somebody really bad. Your bags sort of fell over and all that money spilled out with a huge pair of very sharp scissors, and, well, I guess it scared me some, so I kept looking.” She wrinkled her nose. “You really need to do some laundry.”
I shut my eyes tight and counted to ten to loosen the tightness in my chest. It didn’t work. Fear crawled up from my stomach and lodged in my throat. Ever since Kansas, I hadn’t been able to stop anywhere long enough to eat a decent meal, much less do laundry. Of course, I hadn’t planned on stopping here either, but here I was. I opened my eyes again.
“So, now you know I’m not someone really bad,” I said, though I thought that point was debatable, “or at least I’m not someone from a wanted poster. What about you?”
She looked at me surprised. “I’m not on any posters.”
I nodded. “Good to know.”
“That wasn’t what you meant, though, was it?”
I lifted a hand to run it through my hair. It was shaking. I put it in my lap. “What I’d like to know is what you intend to do.” I watched her watching me until she flushed and looked down into her tea. “I’m sure my family is offering money to anyone who can tell them where I am.”
“A lot of money,” she agreed without looking up. “More than I’ve ever seen.” Her shoulders twitched in a hint of a shrug. “My family’s never had much. It’s hard for me to fathom how just the sight of you can be worth a hundred thousand dollars and how it can be worth half a million to get you back.” She shook her head at the thought. “And I’m the blindest bat in the valley. I should have recognized you right off. The name Collier sure rang a bell, but I didn’t put it all together until I saw your driver’s license. I had to call Aunt Beatrice just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. Sure enough, you really are you.”
“Did you tell your aunt that I was here?”
“No,” Meri said with a slim smile and a shake of her head. “She would’ve thought I was pulling her leg. Rumor has you hiding out in Chicago.” She studied my face. Her eyes wandered all over me until it was my turn to shif
t uncomfortably in my chair.
“You know, I’ve seen pictures of you in magazines and stuff,” she said, “but they all show you with long hair and dressed in fancy clothes going to fundraisers or banquets or balls. With your face all cut up and . . .” She waved her hand at me sitting there in a borrowed sweatshirt and dusty blue jeans. “I guess it’s not so surprising that I didn’t recognize you.”
Her eyes turned dreamy. “Collier Ann Torrington.” She said my name like she was reading it off a marquee. “Half of America is running around trying to spot you, like you were Elvis or something, and here you are right here in Laurelvalley. I’ve got the missing million-dollar bride sitting right here in my kitchen, drinking tea.” She was grinning wider than if she had just won the lottery.
I felt my shoulders sag as all the bone-tired weariness crept back into me. “It’s been almost a month. I thought there would be less of an uproar by now.”
Meri shook her head. “Your departure was so spectacular and your disappearance so mysterious that the newspeople are milking it for all it’s worth. It’ll be a month of Sundays before all the excitement dies down.”
I leaned back in my chair and looked up at the ceiling, at its patterned tin tiles, and then down at my hands gripped white knuckle tight around my tea mug. “I can’t match my father’s offer. I didn’t bring anywhere near that much money with me, but”—I took in a shaky breath—
“I’ll give you all I have if you won’t tell him that I’m here for a few days. I’m only asking that you give me long enough to find a way out of here before you call to claim the money.”
But I couldn’t think of what way that would be, short of stealing a car. There was no way for me to run from here with my bike in pieces, scattered all over her barn floor, and if I had to give her all my money, I wouldn’t even be able to catch a bus. Panic started to build at the thought of having to face my father’s fury.
As Far As Far Enough Page 3