The Summerland

by T. L. Schaefer

  “No. That’s not it, and if you don’t understand it now, I don’t expect you to understand it later. Give me a call when Samantha shows up. She’ll probably need money. You know where to find me.”

  “All right then,” Bill said agreeably, before she could turn back to the door. If she wanted to play it that way, then they could. He crossed his arms, settling in for the long haul. “But before you go, would you mind explaining to me what it is that I’ll never understand? If nothing else, I’d like to know why it’s so easy for you to leave Mariposa and me behind.”

  “Fine. You really want to know? You’re the kind of guy that has ‘relationship’ written all over him. I’m not looking for that now or in the foreseeable future. I just want to find my sister and get back to my nice, normal life.” She spread her hands in a quick, flighty gesture, not quite hiding the nerves making her hands shake, and not quite noticing the subtle relaxation of Bill’s posture as he leaned against the wall opposite her.

  Now he knew what the real problem was. She was scared. Of him, of herself, of them. It was rather ironic, because it was usually the male of the species who bolted in this situation. Instead, after last night, he couldn’t imagine ever waking up without Arden in his bed, in his arms. It was right, it was good, and it was destined, at least in his mind. While he was sorry that her sister’s abduction was the catalyst that had brought them together, he would never regret the end result.

  Arden continued restlessly. “Like I said before, maybe it would be best if we just called it a draw and went about our business. Last night was very nice, but I just can’t deal with this kind of upheaval in my life.”

  Bill pushed away from the wall with a casual motion. If she wanted rational, then he’d give her rational. He was a patient man. He could afford the time it would take her to reconcile her feelings and what she would consider to be her traitorous emotions. And he had just the idea, just the appeal to her honor, that would keep her here in his town, here in his life.

  Let the courting begin.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “Hello Captain Jones, I’m Adam Porter. Sheriff Ashton asked that we speak regarding Samantha.”

  Arden’s thoughts were poisonous as she shook the doctor’s hand across the table. Bill Ashton was a sneaky, conniving son of a bitch. He’d known she wouldn’t leave if there were any way she could assist in tracking down Samantha and her abductor. He’d used her sense of duty against her like a bludgeon, hammering home the point that they needed to understand both the killer and his victims if they had any hope of catching him and saving Sam’s life.

  Her inescapable sense of honor and family had her sitting in a cramped little office at the fairgrounds on a sweltering Monday afternoon, distinctly uncomfortable with the fact that some shrink would be peeling back her brain to look at her psyche.

  “Let me be straight with you, doc.” She began, taking the offensive. “If it weren’t for Sam, you and I wouldn’t be sitting here right now. I don’t mean that in the obvious connotation, either.”

  “Don’t worry Arden, may I call you Arden?” At her stiff nod he continued. “I’ve interviewed military members before. I know you have doubts about the validity of my work and that you don’t trust me farther than you can throw me. Does that about sum it up?”

  Arden grinned crookedly at his synopsis, a little chagrined that he could see through her self-protection measures so easily. “You’re right on the money. Am I that transparent?”

  The handsome doctor shook his head. “No, but as I said, I’ve interviewed military members before. I know the stigma that goes hand in hand with seeing mental health providers, even if it is groundless. We’ll try to work around that conditioning, find out if there’s anything we need to know about Samantha that might help her, all right?”

  And so they began.

  It was a little strange, Arden thought as they talked over the battered top of the desk four days later. After that first meeting it had been her impression that the doctor had initially meant for them to meet only once or twice, to get the basics of what made Samantha tick. Instead, they found themselves building a rapport and common knowledge base that she would have scoffed at only days before.

  But there was more to it than that. In trying to find out more about Samantha, Dr. Porter’s inquisitive mind and searching questions made her dig deep, forced her to analyze her relationship with her estranged sister, to analyze herself. Just as she’d imagined, it was painful to bare her soul, to delve into her childhood and to reveal the things that defined her as Arden Jones. Some of those revelations did not make her happy.

  By Thursday she’d eased into a relaxed, almost friendly relationship with the doctor. His gentle jibes and camaraderie made it easy for her to remember and reflect on her childhood, on the things that had both bound her to and separated her from Sam from the day they were born.

  On this, their final day of interviewing, Dr. Porter surprised her, asking her to take one of those hokey personality tests. Even though she snorted in derision as she answered his questions, she still wondered deep down what the result would be.

  “Well,” he said quietly, “no real revelation there. You’re most definitely a ‘blue.’”

  “What does that mean?” she feigned nonchalance, settling back in her chair.

  Adam read her reaction instantly and instinctively went with the best way to press their interview to the next level, settling into his own chair and tipping it back onto two legs.

  “You’re what the Keirsey test calls a Caregiver.” He chuckled darkly at the horrified expression that crossed her face.

  “You’d never admit it, but making sure that everything and everyone around you are comfortable and cared for is of utmost importance to you. You’re one of those people who will never leave a job until it’s done and done right, because you’d never want to have someone else come in and clean up your mess. You’re not afraid of making mistakes, but you don’t want to inconvenience others when you should have done it correctly the first time. Your sense of wrong and right drives your life, and duty and honor are the most essential things in your makeup. You’re also a romantic at heart, although, once again, you’d never admit it, even to yourself. You’ll never wait for the hero to ride in on his big white horse to come and rescue you, but then again, you never really stop looking for him. And you’re afraid that you may have found him in Bill Ashton.”

  Porter leaned further back in his chair, watching her as she tried to enter her straight-laced military persona and failed.

  Captain Arden Jones was shocked right down to her soul. He was right, so damned right. She ignored his last sentence and concentrated on the characterization that defined who she was. That she could deal with. How could she reconcile the fact that she was all of those things with the fact that she’d joined the Air Force? Because when it came right down to it, wasn’t she trained to kill the enemy? Sure, she was a reporter, but when they sent you to the front lines as an officer, you strapped on an automatic handgun and went about your business, period. Granted, the first time she’d faced a bullet, she’d acted correctly, with instinctive honor, but what if she ever actually had to pull the trigger? Would she be able to do it?

  Adam watched as she struggled to process what he’d said, then spoke again, slowly, surely. “You’re perfectly suited for the military because that sense of duty and honor compel you to do the right thing, regardless of the cost. Your intrinsic tendency to control your environment makes you an outstanding officer and a natural leader. What amazes me is that you and Samantha are so far apart, personality wise.”

  A little unnerved by the shift in topic, Arden could only look at him, waiting for his next pronouncement.

  According to him, Samantha had always been an “orange,” a seeker, a Doer. From his evaluation of what Arden had told him of their childhood and the bits and pieces gleaned from adulthood, Sam was an extrovert. Her blunt straightforwardness compelled her to plunge right into the middle of a
lmost any situation, never looking over her shoulder at the past or up ahead toward the future.

  Arden readily agreed with that evaluation, didn’t see it as anything new or earth shattering. It was his rationale that was unsettling. Adam said that Samantha was probably always two steps ahead of most of the people she interacted with, so she bored easily. Personality types like hers tended to look for the newest, most exciting sensation, from anti-establishment behavior to drugs, all in a search for that indefinable something to make themselves complete. He also seemed to think that someone like Samantha would be the perfect foil to her captor.

  Arden broke into his synopsis with a question.

  “Why do you think that?” She asked, more to assuage her own budding curiosity rather than doubt his perspective. He’d been too perceptive when dealing with her personality profile for her to start wondering about his professional judgment.

  “Let me ask you another question. Is Samantha a people person? One of those personalities who can talk people into doing almost anything for them?” At her nod he continued.

  “Then why shouldn’t she use those innate talents to free herself, to end her confinement? I’ve known Samantha, or women just like her. Because of her very nature, her ingrained antipathy toward authority, she may be able to use the Wiccan aspect of the case as the tool she needs to either defeat him or to complete his fantasy.”

  Arden hummed under her breath, considering. It sounded right, but she wasn’t too sure about the religion mumbo-jumbo. From what she’d learned from Ynes earlier this summer, Samantha wasn’t the most likely candidate to take up the Wiccan religion. Still, Dr. Porter been right in almost everything else, and was supposed to be a world-renowned expert on women, so she had to lend his hypothesis a whole hell of a lot of credence.

  Even though he only mentioned it that once, he’d danced around her relationship with the Sheriff on stealthy feet, never quite asking if she wanted to talk about it, but never closing the door entirely. She’d learned a great many things about herself and Samantha over the course of the last several days and was still trying to figure out how to ease into the new, improved skin of Arden Jones. Of all the things she’d dealt with recently, Bill Ashton was the last thing she wanted to touch upon.

  In the four days since their hallway confrontation, Bill had studiously left Arden alone. At first she’d been grateful for the solitude, happy that he’d let it, let her, go. Then it began to confound and irritate her in equal measures. He’d gone out of his way to make her stay, then he ignored her.

  * * * *

  After almost a week of having her brain picked, Arden deserved a day off. At least that was her line of thinking. Taking a day trip to Yosemite had seemed like a good idea until she heard that over three million people visited the park from May to September. She didn’t really feel like becoming three million and one. She just wanted to sit someplace quiet, someplace where she could think about herself and Samantha and the convoluted twists and turns the paths of their lives had taken.

  She settled for taking an early morning drive, not even bothering to read the paper or catch the news before she left. The little red sports coupe purred down the road, Arden’s hair blazing behind it like a flaxen flag as she wove and wound her way up and down the sinuous, golden curves and inlets that made up the foothills. While she drove, her eyes devoured the dry hillsides, scraggly bull pines and fuzzily gray granite that fought its way out of the reddish mountain clay.

  Before she knew it she had passed through the tiny town of Bear Valley and realized where she had unconsciously driven. If she took a sharp left turn she would be at Bill’s ranch in a matter of minutes. As she drove those last few hundred yards to the turn-off her subconscious weighed the pros and cons of making that left turn. In the end rationality won out, made her drive straight ahead, up and up until the only thing surrounding her were golden hillsides and fire-dry mesquite. When it seemed like the foothills would go on forever, she topped a small ridge and stopped right in the middle of the road.

  The vista was like nothing she’d ever seen before. The hillsides folded down and up and sideways, always maintaining their tawny coat of late summer. Ahead of her a valley opened up, the slate gray-blue of a river slicing it’s way through the bottom. In a dream, she eased out the clutch, heading for the scenic turnout just a few hundred feet ahead.

  Gravel crunched under the sports car’s tires as she wheeled to the guardrail, then stepped out into the already-searing heat, her eyes devouring the landscape before her. The highway snaked down the side of the mountain, looping in and out of the gullies and washes carved into the mountainside, doubling back on itself so many times she lost count. Two thousand feet below her an impossibly thin two-lane bridge traversed the river, granting access to the other side.

  This is what she’d been looking for, something untamed and new. She all but leapt back into the car, furiously pelting down the mountain toward an unknown but bone-deep desire. Deep gorges and mini-canyons beckoned, luring her eyes away from the road. Deep caves carved into the native rock and boasting ‘No Trespassing’ signs all but begged her to come in and explore. In the end she muscled the car down the road, headed toward the bridge and her utter conviction that her salvation lay at the end of that road.

  As she reached the bottom of the canyon, the bridge shot across the river, offering mindless travel in its silver-black ribbon of road. Instead, she turned right, down a small dirt entryway, and eased the Miata into the all-but-empty lot of a tiny store/bait shop.

  The store was like any you would see across rural America, vinyl sides starting to oxidize, a sleeping and possibly dead dog lying in front, and a disreputable looking pick-up truck sitting right next to the enormous satellite TV receiver. Yes, it fit all of the notions of a backwoods bait shop, with the exception of its location. It sat on the side of the canyon overlooking the river and boasted the shadiest, most inviting picnic table Arden had ever seen. It was a place where local politics would be discussed and stogies smoked as the slumberous river rolled by, day after day, week after week.

  Under that tree, sitting on the table itself, was the most remarkable man that Arden had ever seen. She could see the thin, home-rolled cigarette resting between his fingers, a workman’s corded arms bared in the cut-off sleeves of his T-shirt, a tan deep and genuine that it had to be baked in, probably acquired in his early twenties. He looked exactly like what Arden imagined a father would look like in this part of the country. Hard-edged, rough and true.

  She headed into the store first, for a cold drink. The woman manning the checkout counter was in her early sixties and attractive, in a homespun, hard-working kind of way. Arden realized that she must have been quite beautiful in her youth. Paying for her iced tea, she absentmindedly answering the woman’s questions as she made her way to the door.

  The store was definitely a catchall. Gold pans hung next to fishing lures, which hung next to bags of marshmallows, which sat next to gigantic bags of charcoal briquettes. Kodak photographs of fishermen graced the walls, proudly displaying their catches with gap-toothed smiles.

  The Coca-Cola thermometer hanging on the wall of the building was sun-washed and bleached with time and already read 90 degrees.

  The man sitting at the table swung his careworn face toward her, measuring her in a keen, encompassing glance. He scooted over on the table, offering her a seat, then stared back out over the river, cigarette dangling from one hand, coffee cup from the other.

  Arden eased up on the seat next to him, not quite sure how she trusted this total stranger so quickly, so totally. But it was there. Maybe this was the epiphany she’d felt awaiting her.

  Comfortable in the silence, she scratched behind the ears of the shorthaired mutt that was indeed alive and had relinquished his spot beside the door, hoping for a stranger’s affection. The dog flopped down in front of her, seemingly exhausted by the process of walking ten feet in this heat.

  The man to Arden’s right snorted disgustedl
y. “Damned lazy dog. All he does is eat and sleep.” The tones of affection were obvious in the man’s voice, his ownership proud and clear.

  “Yeah, but who doesn’t envy a dog’s life?” She asked, leaning back on the table as she stared across the river at the ruins and foundations dotting the far hillside.

  Her companion turned to look at her, interest apparent in his eyes. “Who indeed? Hello, I’m Jack, the woman running this whole kit and caboodle is my wife, Victoria.” He set down the coffee mug, offering his hand in a courtly, old school gesture.

  “Hi.” She answered with a smile as she shook his weathered, callused hand. “I’m Arden.”

  Even though she left her name at just that, she had the distinct feeling that he knew exactly who and what she was.

  “So, Arden, what are you doing passing through Bagby on such a dismal, hot Friday? Fair Days are over, school is back in session, and most of the tourists have left Yosemite. Why is a nice military girl like you prowling the hills of Northern California?”

  Arden started to ask how he knew she was in the service, then realized that he could see the military stickers on her car. Before she knew what she was saying, it was said.

  “I’m looking for myself, I guess. Trying to make sure I haven’t been lost somewhere along the way.”

  Jack shook his head a little, his eyes never leaving her. “Seems to me if you know enough to look, then you probably weren’t lost in the first place. A little misdirected maybe, but not lost.” He shrugged, turning his attention once more to the mindless flow of the river.

  Arden sat there for a moment, absorbing what he’d said. Maybe he was right, maybe not.

  The decision was hers to make. It was a liberating to think that, she realized. She’d always been told what to do, by her parents, by the military, in her marriage, so she’d never really made any life decisions about Arden Jones.

  She knew what choice had to be made, and made today if she were to really move forward in her life.