Buffalo Bill's Defunct (9781564747112)

by Simonson, Sheila

  He straightened and smiled at her for the first time. “More than beer and pizza.”

  “Beer and pizza, too, if necessary,” Meg conceded.

  “What time?”

  Meg almost said “now,” but the thought was too horrible. Every bone in her body ached. She wanted a hot shower and bed. “Is there a motel in town?” She had stayed at a cheap hotel near Portland Airport when she came for the job interview last spring and later that summer when she was house-hunting.

  “The Red Hat Inn,” Darcy piped.

  “Sounds like a refuge for deer-slayers.”

  Darcy blinked.

  Neill grinned through the paint blotches. One of his incisors was crooked. “A respectable establishment, Ms. McLean. The restaurant does great chicken-fried steak.”

  Meg shuddered.

  “Venison steak.”

  “I think you’re rattling my chain. I’ll take any help I can get, but eight tomorrow morning would be ideal.”

  “Okay,” Neill said. “Beer and pizza at eight o’clock. See you. I have to get back to work. Blue latex is drying on my paint roller as we speak.” And he turned and walked off, disappearing through a rose arbor that, incredibly, still showed a few pink blossoms.

  “That’s settled,” Darcy said cheerfully. “Welcome to Klalo. I have to run now, Meg. My son’s Cub Scout meeting lets out in five minutes.” She trotted off.

  Surely she wasn’t old enough to have given birth to a Cub Scout. “Thanks,” Meg called after her. Darcy waved.

  Alone and glad to be alone, Meg wandered back into the house. She remembered to lower the temperature on the thermostat to a respectable sixty-eight degrees. Then she locked up, fetched her carry-on, cell phone, and laptop from the cab of the van, locked it up, and stumbled over to the Accord. She supposed she ought to stow the tow trailer out of sight but she didn’t remember being given a key to the garage. A puzzle. Her brain whirred in place. That key wasn’t with the others. She’d have to stop by the real estate office, but it would be closed by now.

  She threw her belongings into the trunk. Dragging the balky trailer around to the back yard involved bumping it over flagstones and hummocks of grass and through a derelict gate. The trailer nudged the gatepost. With a creak, the remains of the gate declined against an anonymous bush. Lots of yard work. Lots of yard to work. Grass and fruit trees and beds of dead irises.

  She parked the trailer in a hollow behind the garage and tried to peer through the building’s single window, a cloudy square on the back door. The door didn’t give when she shook it. She couldn’t see anything but the sheet of stained plywood someone had leaned against it. She hoped that didn’t mean the garage was full of junk. The house was empty. Had she inspected the garage? She couldn’t remember. She’d looked at a lot of houses in three days.

  Fatigue dragged at her shoulders and knees. Time to find the motel. She looked the Red Hat Inn up in her handy AAA Guide. She had passed the motel on her way into town and hadn’t seen it, because she had been busy not looking at the Columbia River. It flowed right at the city limits with a municipal marina for fishing boats and pleasure craft.

  The river was very, very big. She thought of the sad trickle of water through the concrete channels of Los Angeles. It would take some time to get used to this much fresh water moving past.

  The town itself was pleasantly quaint, a well-preserved jumble of housing in most of the architectural styles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She had expected the dearth of pseudo-haciendas. What had surprised her was the relative lack of strip malls and fast-food franchises, and the trees, lots and lots of trees.

  Klalo sat at the edge of a major national forest. To the north stretched ridge after rising ridge of blue-green firs and spruces, but the homeowners had not been content with native timber. They appeared to have imported all the deciduous species of northern Europe and the American Midwest, and all those trees were still leafed out. Each house had at least one huge tree in its front yard, and not one of those trees was a eucalyptus or an olive or a palm. Even the bushes were different. Meg did not see oleander. Who would have thought she’d miss oleander?

  The Red Hat turned out to be pricier and better than she had expected. A tourist resort, why not? The Columbia Gorge was a National Scenic Area. She put the room on her overloaded Visa. Then she took a long shower, sat in the Jacuzzi, dried herself on the vast bath sheet, and took a two-hour nap. When she rose, she was ready for chicken-fried venison.

  WHERE?” The shorter of the two movers—Jake, his name was—shifted his grip on Meg’s queen-sized mattress. The other, Todd, steadied his end against the wall.

  “Upstairs, front bedroom.”

  Both men groaned. They had only been working an hour, but they had already moved all the smaller boxes and other clutter into the designated rooms. Meg watched them as they trundled the wobbly mattress up the stairway.

  They had told her they were off-duty sheriff’s deputies looking for a little cash. They were young, fit as tigers, and fast. The boss said she was willing to pay them a hundred apiece to unload, no shit?

  “No shit,” Meg had murmured, bemused. “Is Mr. Neill the sheriff?”

  Jake snorted.

  Todd said, “He’s just head of Investigation, not our supervisor, really. We’re uniforms. Drive a patrol car.”

  Meg groped through flashbacks of a thousand TV dramas. “Partners?”

  Jake nodded. “We have Wednesday and Thursday off. Rob thought we might want to pick up beer money.”

  “Rent money,” Todd corrected, rueful.

  Jake frowned at him. “You blew the rent again?”

  “Not all of it,” Todd said meekly.

  “I’m delighted to meet you both,” Meg interposed. “You’re saving my life.” She took them inside the house and showed them around the ground floor. She would make them coffee, she decided, as soon as she found the pot.

  The two young men had been waiting on her front porch when she drove up at 7:52. They introduced themselves, shook hands, and amiably directed nonexistent traffic as she backed the truck around and inched the rear end across the sidewalk. At the right moment Jake stopped her. By the time she jumped down from the truck they had pulled out the built-in metal ramp. It reached smoothly over the front steps and settled with a light clank onto the porch.

  “Front door’s narrow, but we can take it off the hinges and roll the heavy stuff through on the handcart, no sweat.” Todd squinted at the door. He was twenty-five, at most, with a round, rosy face, black hair, and dark eyes.

  “Except the refrigerator,” Jake muttered. He looked to be a few years older than his partner/roommate—squatter, uglier, less optimistic.

  “Well, great,” Meg said faintly. “Go for it.” And they did. They finished before noon, refrigerator and all, and even helped her lift the car trailer into the back of the van. Meg never did find the coffeepot.

  She bought them lunch at the nearest drive-in, paid them in crisp fifties, and almost cried when they volunteered to follow her in the Honda all the way to Vancouver. She had to return the van to the rental agency before five p.m. and she would have had to take a taxi for the fifty-mile ride back to Klalo.

  SHE owed the two deputies a lot more than $200, she reflected, strapped into the back seat of the Accord. They whisked east past Camas, retracing her route of the previous day. Todd drove. He was a cowboy but Meg didn’t care. Maybe she would never drive again. She could walk to work.

  “You’re the new librarian, right?” Jake, making conversation.

  “Not for another ten days,” Meg said.

  “My sister drives the bookmobile.”

  “Annie Baldwin?” Meg visualized the stocky aide she had met last spring. There wasn’t much resemblance, and the woman had to be ten years older than her brother.

  Jake craned around the headrest and gave her an approving smile. “Yeah, Annie, my big sister. She says that old truck’s gonna need a new transmission.”

  Meg�
��s groan was only half-theatrical. The library budget, like all library budgets, was tight.

  “Annie’s old man can baby it along for a while.”

  “Her husband’s a mechanic?”

  “Works for the Forest Service planting trees, but he can fix anything, fixed my ex-wife’s Datsun when it died last winter. Saved me a bundle.”

  “Cheapskate.” Todd passed a pickup. An oncoming car let out a long, moaning honk.

  “Hey, slow down, guy.” Jake returned his attention to the road briefly.

  Meg breathed again. “So you’re deputies. How did you get into law enforcement?” She eased back against the seat and listened to their lives.

  Jake Sorenson was thirty, divorced, a former MP. Todd Welch had a certificate in administration of justice from Clark College. He was single and a rookie. Jake had been on the county payroll for five years. They were underpaid and overworked but cheerful about it.

  They had shared an apartment in town for six months, an arrangement that probably wouldn’t last long, from the sound of things. They took verbal jabs at each other—most, but not all, good-natured. Jake was neat, Todd a slob. Neither liked to cook, so they mostly lived on pizza and Chinese food from the Safeway deli. Jake worked out at a local gym. Todd ran when the spirit moved him. His girlfriend taught second grade, owned her own double-wide mobile home, and they were both Republicans. Obviously a match made in heaven. Jake didn’t express a political preference. Neither of the two deputies used the library, but Todd’s girlfriend checked out lots of historical romances.

  When they reached Klalo, Meg remembered to ask Todd to stop at the real estate office for the key to the garage. The harried agent eventually found it. The guys decanted Meg at her front door and waved good-bye as they chugged off in Jake’s old pickup, set for a night on the town. Nice kids. Meg peered up Rob Neill’s driveway but didn’t see his truck. She’d thank him tomorrow. Meanwhile, the house.

  At that moment, she felt a return of the zest with which she had begun the journey north. This was it, a new beginning, McLean, Stage Three. Stage One had been Feckless Meg. Stage Two, of course, Mom. Stage Three would be different. Margaret the Magnificent.

  First things first. She made up her bed and tacked a sheet across the window until she could find the box of curtains she’d salvaged from her condo. She also located bathroom furnishings and supplied the upstairs john with towels, toothpaste, soap, and shampoo.

  The towels led her down to the ground-floor bathroom and from there into the kitchen. Although the refrigerator hummed, the stove ignited, and rusty water whooshed from the tap when she turned it on, the table and counters were still covered with movers’ cartons. The cupboard shelves were bare. She had made a grocery list and was about to go out to the local supermarket when her cell phone rang: Lucy at the appointed hour. Lucy seemed relieved to find her mother coherent and cheerful.

  One call led to another. Meg rang the library and announced her safe arrival. Marybeth Jackman, the woman who was going to be her assistant, sounded cool but warmed up a little when Meg assured her she didn’t need help.

  Jackman had been appointed temporary head on the death of the previous chief librarian. She had been an unsuccessful candidate for Meg’s new job. Fences to mend there. Ah, well, there was plenty of time left before that problem had to be faced.

  Meg drove through the almost deserted streets to the supermarket, racked up $150 worth of groceries, and even remembered to stop by the liquor store on the way back—demon rum was not for sale in ordinary Washington food stores though there was wine and beer in abundance.

  When Meg had stowed her purchases and unpacked china, cutlery, and basic cookware, she poured herself a Scotch and started a pot of vegetable soup. At that point she remembered the garage-door key.

  She sipped Red Label and meditated. There was no great hurry. She could investigate the garage in the morning. On the other hand, it might be a good idea to park the car under cover. Klalo had a low crime rate, but years of living in Greater Los Angeles had taught Meg caution. The Honda Accord was vehicle of choice for car thieves.

  The lid of her stockpot rattled. She turned the gas down, nipped at the whisky, and dug the key out of her coin purse. It was an undistinguished object; if she hadn’t stuck it in the purse it might have been lost forever.

  Wandering out the side door, she made a mental note to have all the keys copied. She could leave the extra set with Darcy in case of emergency.

  The key didn’t work on the rear door of the garage, so she trailed back through the collapsed gate and across the uneven flagstones to the drive. The front doors, which opened out like shutters rather than rolling up like the usual garage door, fastened with a padlock. The lock opened on her second try and the doors on her third. Grass had grown up along the bottom edges of the doors.

  Dark and dank but empty. That was her first, relieved impression of the interior. She had been afraid she would find floor-to-ceiling junk. The garage had a dirt floor—dirt and gravel like the driveway. Memory was returning. She had inspected the garage.

  After a moment, her eyes adjusted to the gloom and her nose quivered. It was dark, all right, and worse than dank. Somebody’s cat must have died.

  Annoyed, she edged along the wall, feeling for a light switch. At the back of the building she groped near the door and dislodged the sheet of plywood. It fell inward with a swish of compressed air. Meg blinked grit from her vision and found the switch. An overhead job-light, not very bright, dangled from the cross beam. It shed a dim pool of illumination over the space, which looked rough, as if someone had stirred it.

  The fallen plywood reached about a third of the way toward the churned spot. An image returned. When she’d viewed the house at the end of July, the gravel had been raked as smooth as a Zen garden. The real estate agent told her the owner had held a series of garage sales before the final clean-up. The house had only been on the market three days when Meg first saw it. She wished she hadn’t missed the garage sales.

  She squatted at the edge of her plywood raft and touched the gravel. It was dry but a little greasy on her fingers. Maybe a confused mole had surfaced in the middle of the garage, then ducked back down in disappointment. No, the surface wasn’t mounded— not moles or gophers. A few shards of black pottery lay scattered over dirt and rock. One shard was palm-sized. Meg turned it over, surprised to find it heavy. Not ceramic. Stone.

  She picked it up and straightened, holding it under the light. A stick figure had been chipped into the surface. Garage-sale detritus?

  Uneasy, Meg carried the shard out into direct sunlight. Brown and gray blotches on the black surface almost obscured the partial drawing of a flute player with an odd, rayed headdress. The musician curled over his instrument, but the tip of the flute was missing. The figure looked like a petroglyph but surely wasn’t. Before she applied for the library job, Meg had read up on the attractions of the National Scenic Area. Petroglyphs featured large in the prehistory—upstream, she thought, near The Dalles on the Oregon side.

  Leaving the doors open to air the garage out, she went back into the kitchen. She set the rock fragment on the counter, washed her sticky hands, and returned to her Scotch. Should she call someone? Not 911—there was no emergency, probably no crime, though she had read that looting was a problem at Native American sites throughout the West. She thought of Neill. She owed him a thank-you. She could mention her “find” to him, ask his advice.

  Conscience eased, she stirred the soup and went back to unpacking kitchen goods. One thing led to another. By nine o’clock she had eaten soup and artisan bread, rearranged her grandmother’s china in the glass-fronted dish cupboard, and was off in what had been the ground-floor bedroom setting up her office. The sun had long gone down. Apart from a passing motorcycle and the barking of an occasional dog, the silence of the neighborhood was absolute. When the brisk knocking came it startled her. She dropped a handful of paperbacks.

  Another knock resounded. Kitchen doo
r. She straightened, creaking a little, walked into the kitchen, and peered out.

  It was Rob Neill.

  She glanced at her watch. Nine-fifteen. Late to be paying a friendly visit.

  “Hi,” she said, opening the door. “Come in. I want to thank you for Todd and Jake. They did a great job.”

  “Good.” He stepped past her. He was paint-free, wearing a sports jacket and polo shirt over pressed levis. Formal attire after yesterday’s paint-speckled jeans and sweatshirt. “Are you aware your garage doors are open with the light on?”

  She smacked her forehead. “I forgot. I was carried away by the thrill of unpacking. Have a chair.” She waved vaguely at the kitchen table. “Can I get you a drink?”

  “No, thanks.” He remained standing. “I chased the county commissioner’s dog out of your garage. He was digging at something.”

  She stared at him, frowning. “That’s strange.”

  “The commissioner’s dog is worse than strange. One of these days he’s going to eat a baby.”

  “Don’t you have a leash law in Klalo?”

  He sighed. “We do. The commissioner is a Libertarian. He does not believe in leash laws. Towser was Born Free.”

  Her memory conjured up a fat, truculent face and high-pitched voice. “Ah…Commissioner Brandstetter? I met him.”

  “Right.”

  “When I said strange I didn’t mean the pit bull.”

  “Rhodesian Ridgeback. A hundred pounds of playful pooch.”

  “Whatever. I meant the garage. Is the smell gone?”

  “I didn’t sniff.”

  Meg saw the shard on the end of the counter by the cell phone. She’d put both items there out of reach of dishwater. “I found this.” She handed the shard to him and described her venture into the garage, the area of disturbed surface, the dead-cat odor.

  Frowning, he took the piece by the edges. He seemed to frown a lot. He didn’t say anything for a long time.

  “It couldn’t be anything important…. I thought about calling the sheriff’s office….” She shut up.