Blood Memory

by Margaret Coel

  The instant she emerged from the building and started down the cloister, he would get out of the Ford, carrying the Journal folded around the gun. Ironic, he thought. She’d walk along the front of the parked cars, the way she’d entered the hospital—people were such creatures of habit—while he would walk along the back. He would watch her out of the corner of his eyes without alarming her. Just another hospital visitor heading back to his car with his newspaper. He had to pace his steps to hers—timing was critical in this business. She had to reach the convertible first, open the driver’s door, and slide onto the seat. Before she could pull the door closed, he would move between the door and her, his finger curled around the trigger. He would shoot her in the head from maybe six inches away because his client wanted to make certain she was dead—no slipups, no wounds that the hospital emergency doctors could fix. There would be a thud, but not a loud gunshot, thanks to the silencer—nothing that wouldn’t meld into the traffic noise and the sound of tires clawing asphalt as cars pulled in and out of the parking lot. He would slip the gun back inside the folded paper, close the door, as if he’d been chatting with an old friend, and walk back. He would be out of the parking lot before anyone noticed the woman’s head lolling against the headrest, or the blood trickling across her face.

  There she was.

  He saw her pushing open the glass door. An older woman, stoop shouldered and leaning on a walking stick, plodded ahead. Then a pregnant woman pushing a stroller, and Catherine McLeod, the Good Samaritan, holding the door for the little parade. She stepped outside and started down the cloister.

  Erik Bolton stared in disbelief. She wasn’t alone. Walking alongside her, shielding her from the parking lot, was a security guard in a gray uniform with a holstered gun fixed to his wide, black belt. They emerged from the cloister and walked along the front of the cars, just as he had anticipated she would do. In lock step, she and the security guard, a professional, Eric realized, with eyes that took in everything even though his head didn’t move. The eyes had taken him in, too, the man behind the steering wheel of a brown Ford sedan, reading the newspaper folded in front of him, waiting for someone. The security guard was still next to her at the car, opening the door, standing aside until she’d settled herself behind the wheel. There was a sharp thwack when he shut the door. Then he stepped away and waited as Catherine McLeod backed out of the space, shifted forward, and drove out of the lot.

  Eric waited, too. He waited until the guard had walked back through the cloister and into the hospital before he turned the ignition and drove after the silver convertible.

  8

  Catherine drove west on I-70 in the rush-hour traffic, the foothills of the mountains turning violet in the shadows, the crush of suburbs, shopping centers, and warehouses falling behind. She passed a truck and settled into the right lane. The wind blew her hair about. She turned the CD up: Coltrane’s saxophone, double-time and angry. Rex perched on the backseat, craning over the top of the passenger seat. Sunlight reflected on the cars streaming past. The hood of the Chrysler looked watery in the late-afternoon brightness. On the passenger seat was the brown envelope that Marjorie had handed her earlier.

  She’d stopped at the town house to pick up Rex and get enough of her things for two or three days. God, let Bustamante find the shooter by then. The town house had seemed strange and unfamiliar this afternoon, unlike this morning when she had gone home to feed Rex, shower, and sleep a little. She had been still in shock then, she realized, fuzzy headed, stumbling through the aftermath of a bad dream. She had looked away from the blood spattered on the furniture and congealed on the floor. They seemed unreal, not part of her life.

  It was different this afternoon, and the difference left her feeling shaky and tense. She had driven around the block several times, waiting for the police officer to arrive and escort her into her own home. In less than fifteen minutes, she’d thrown the slacks and shirts and shoes, the lipsticks and moisturizers into a large backpack, slipped her laptop inside its case, stacked cans of dog food in a paper bag and was back in the convertible with Rex in the backseat. She’d waved a thank-you to the officer—blond crew cut, not more than twenty-five, with sunburned cheeks and the bored impatience of a man eager to be somewhere else.

  Bustamante had been right to insist on a police escort. It wasn’t just that the shock had begun to wear off. It was all of it: the e-mail from Erik, the warnings that came from everywhere—Bustamante, Lawrence, Marjorie Fennerman—as if everyone else understood the intruder had come for her. And finally her own reluctant acceptance of the truth. Erik was out there somewhere, watching and waiting.

  At the hospital, the sense that he was close had swept over her, leaving her numb, stumbling off the escalator. She’d stood in the atrium and watched the people file past, shaky with the thought that he could be among them. It had taken all of her strength to walk over to the security guard at the entrance. She’d barely begun to explain about the intruder when his eyebrows had come together in a thin, black line and he’d looked as if an apparition had sprung up in front of him. She was that woman. Yes, yes, he’d said. He’d heard about it on the radio on his way to work this afternoon. The gunshot victim was upstairs in ICU, might not make it, they say. And if you asked him, she oughtta be careful until the police sorted it all out. You never know these days, all the crackpots out there. Every day victims came to the emergency room, a steady stream of victims. Guy with the gun could have been looking specifically for her. You never know. He would walk her out to her car.

  He was a big man, half a head taller than Catherine. Gray uniform, holstered gun. Still she’d felt her muscles tighten as they’d headed down the covered walkway and across the sidewalk that bordered the parking lot. She had glanced at the parked cars—people waiting inside, a man peering down at a newspaper folded on the steering wheel—and at the people coming and going. She was still on edge when she’d reached the town house. If the police escort hadn’t arrived, she never would have gone inside. She would have gotten Rex from the side yard, watching the town house all the time, expecting the shooter’s hideous face to appear in one of the windows. Then she would have stomped on the gas pedal and driven out of the neighborhood fast.

  She pulled around a green pickup lumbering ahead, belching black smoke, and thought about it. She might never be able to go back to the town house, go back home. It was possible that yet another life she had tried to make was over.

  She moved into the exit lane, followed the line of traffic through a series of exits—Highway 470 first, then Highway 285—and headed into the mountains. The slopes looked ragged, dense with boulders and ponderosas. Every few miles, there were vistas of mountain valleys carpeted in golden grasses and purple and red wildflowers. These were the mountains around Turkey Creek Canyon where the old Denver families had built their ranches—here and in Estes Park. But Estes Park was northwest of Boulder, farther away. “We liked these mountains,” Lawrence had explained one evening when they were driving to the ranch, as if he had been part of the family decision more than a hundred years ago.

  A large green sign loomed next to the highway, Conifer and Bailey, in big white letters. Sprawling mountain towns that had evolved from little stops for stagecoaches on the dirt road from Denver, according to Lawrence. All part of the history of his own family, and she envied him that. He knew who he was, where he belonged, and no matter where she was, she had always felt that she belonged somewhere else. She had tried to fit in with Marie and Dad, with Lawrence. And she had loved all of them.

  The Denver, South Park, and Pacific Railroad had run up here, she remembered Lawrence telling her. And wasn’t it his great-grandfather who had helped to finance the railroad? Yes, that’s what Lawrence had said. Leland Stern had been involved in so many things—Denver’s first water company, first trolley cars, first electrical power company—it was hard to remember all of them. The stage stops had evolved into little towns alongside the train tracks. Every day the trains stopp
ed at the stations to disgorge passengers. Denver families always rode the train, Lawrence said, as if the Sterns and their wealthy friends comprised the entire population of the city. Carriages met them at the Pine Station, which the highway had left stranded, and took them to their ranches in Turkey Creek Canyon.

  Everything had changed, of course. The railroad abandoned, tracks torn up and sold for scrap metal, highways and automobiles everywhere. There had been a note of regret in his tone when Lawrence talked about the changes, and she remembered thinking that he had been born too late. He would have preferred to be swaying in the coach of a train, with a carriage waiting at the station, than driving the BMW on Highway 285 with her.

  It had been a while since Catherine had been at the Stern ranch— more than a year ago, and so much had changed since then, so many other things crowded into her life—that she wondered if she had passed the turnoff. There were no signs. None of the families had wanted signs directing the public to their ranches. She slowed a little, watching the edge of the highway ahead for the spur of an asphalt road. The dark sedan behind her veered past and honked.

  Then she spotted the bridge over the highway and the gray, single-lane road that looped up the mountainside and disappeared. She tapped on the brake pedal. The tires squealed as she banked into the exit. Lawrence would take the exit so fast—odd, the things that came back to her—that she would brace herself against the dashboard and close her eyes, half expecting the BMW to fly off the mountain.

  The road was empty, with a lingering sense that other traffic had passed by, like the faint smell of aftershave in the house after Lawrence had left in the mornings. The asphalt gave way to a dirt road that narrowed and switched back on itself as it climbed higher. Every curve opened onto a different view: the highway below threaded between the slopes, the shadows crawling over Denver in the distance, and beyond, the flat, open plains still golden in the sunlight. She spotted a brown sedan taking the asphalt turnoff below.

  It was there again as she came around another curve. Starting up the road behind her, the front tires leaning into a turn. The hood and roof looked black in the shadows. The CD had moved on to a slower, darker piece. “People drive up here,” she said out loud, as if Rex were a nervous passenger she had to reassure. “The Sterns aren’t the only people with homes in the area.”

  The ranch was close now. She recognized the log fence that had appeared out of nowhere, running through the pines. She shoved away the thought of the brown sedan behind her and hunched over the steering wheel, searching for another dirt road that branched to the right. She spotted the road around the next curve, pulled the steering wheel right, and drove toward the iron gate ahead. She stopped close to the post on the left and waited. The cameras would have already focused on the car. It was only a moment before the intercom came alive: “Who is it?”

  “Catherine McLeod.” She shouted toward the metal circle in the post.

  Another moment passed before the gates started to creak open on the rusty metal hinges. Rex gave a little bark and swung his head back and forth. “It’s okay,” she said. She eased on the gas pedal and drove onto the Stern ranch. She could hear the gates closing behind as she followed the narrow dirt road, cut through a tunnel of junipers. A short distance beyond the gate, the forest stopped at the edge of a meadow studded with boulders, clumps of wildflowers, and wild golden grass tinged with the blue light of dusk. A creek ran through the center, and little wooden bridges here and there served as walkways from one side to the other.

  This was where the residential compound was located, sprawling across the meadow behind the thick wall of junipers and ponderosas, a hushed, private place. The meadow seemed frozen in the nineteenth century. There were no sounds of traffic—no honking horns, no engines gearing down, no tires thrumming on asphalt. The highway she’d been on fifteen minutes ago might have been a million miles away, in a century yet to come. Across the creek ahead was the family ranch house, a façade of stone and logs and a series of peaked roofs that crawled up a slight hill. A tower rose on the front corner, tiny windows cut into stone, and everywhere, around every window and below every roof, was Victorian gingerbread trim. Below the front windows were flower boxes filled with red geraniums and purple and white petunias.

  On the other side of the creek was the guest cottage, a smaller version of the main house, with similar peaked roofs and flower-filled window boxes. Farther down the road and out of sight, Catherine knew, were the barns and bunkhouse and cabins for the cowboys and staff. But the house that resembled a guard house—two stories of stone, narrow and rounded like the tower on the main house, with flower boxes beneath the lower-level windows—was directly ahead. It was where Gilly Mason, the ranch manager, lived, and Gilly was out in front now, waving her down.

  Catherine stopped in the middle of the road and waited for him to come around the hood. He was the picture of a cowboy—narrow hips, roped arms, and muscular shoulders of a man who wouldn’t think twice about throwing a steer. He wore blue jeans, a blue Western shirt with a large silver and turquoise watch protruding from the right cuff, and worn, dirt-smudged cowboy boots. The tan straw cowboy hat sat back on his head so that the V-shaped brim pointed upward. It was hard to guess his age—the bronzed, leathery face, the gray working into his dark hair, and the gray stubble on his chin. Early sixties, probably. He’d been with the family thirty years. Elizabeth Stern had hired him—a Vietnam vet who had stood up to the Viet Cong and taken a bullet in his leg in Da Nang. He always kept a rifle close at hand. Elizabeth trusted Gilly.

  “Been expecting you.” He had the raspy voice of a smoker. He set both hands on the ledge of her door and leaned over. Catherine turned off the CD. Odors of tobacco and coffee floated toward her. Deep lines etched his sun-hardened face. His nose was crosshatched with a network of red veins. “Dial zero if you need anything.”

  Catherine thanked him and drove forward. She could see him staring after her in the side-view mirror. Knowing Gilly was nearby—a guard with a gun—gave her a sense of relief. She turned onto the one-lane bridge, bounced across the logs, and followed the dirt road around the main house. She parked close to the porch of the guest cottage and took a moment, waiting for the gust of memories to subside. They came to the cottage almost every weekend in the summers, she and Lawrence. They hiked up into the high mountains that surrounded the ranch. They fished for trout in the streams, spread out a blanket and ate the sandwiches they’d carried in their backpacks and made love outdoors in the shade and the sun. They came to the ranch in the winter, strapped on cross-country skis, and glided through the forest, making their own trails in the snow.

  It surprised her—she hadn’t counted on the force of the memories. She had put it all behind her, the past life with Lawrence. She felt naked and vulnerable and self-conscious, as if she were less than what she had once been. She’d thought she knew who she was, when she had been his wife.

  What did it matter! She opened the door, got out, and let Rex out of the back. She had built a new life. Resumed her career and made new friends, like Maury. She felt a little shiver run through her, like the point of a knife scraping her skin.

  Rex bounded free, raced to the creek, and lapped up a drink of water. Then he was running about, circling the car, and nosing around the porch. Catherine hauled the backpack, laptop case, and bag of dog food out of the trunk and deposited them in a pile next to the door. The key was in the lock. She let herself inside and, one by one, carried the bags across the threshold. Then she stopped, stunned by the wall of memories rising before her. She felt as if she had stepped into her own past: chintz, overstuffed sofas and chairs scattered about the large living room, remnants of light filtering through the windows, dark-wood cabinets visible in the kitchen, hallway leading to the bedrooms and baths and the study where Lawrence had moved in his favorite brown leather chair. The cottage had been theirs, and Lawrence had gotten his grandmother to agree. Other guests were sent to one of the cabins by the bunkhouse.

/>   Catherine shoved the memories against the back of her mind. Everything was different now; the ranch was a safe place, that was all. She carried the dog food into the kitchen, opened a can, and spooned the red, juicy meat into a bowl that she found in the cabinet. She carried the bowl out to the porch where Rex waited, tail wagging so hard that he was shaking. She set the bowl down and went back to the kitchen. The refrigerator was filled: roasted chicken, cheeses, yogurt, lettuce, tomatoes, green grapes, strawberries and apples, a variety of sauces and salad dressings. Steaks, hamburger, fish fillets were stacked in the freezer, along with extra loaves of bread and ice cream. She checked the pantry—bags of pasta and cans of soup, tomato sauce, olives, pickles, mustard, and ketchup.

  She slammed the cabinet door. She could hear Rex pushing the bowl across the porch. They could stay for months. When the food ran out, Gilly would replace it. She would never have to leave. She would be safe. And this was what he had done to her, a man called Erik who intended to kill her. Robbed her of everything she had worked for the past year, stolen whatever was left of her life after Lawrence.

  She carried her backpack down the hallway into the large bedroom with the four-poster bed that was so high they had used a stepping stool to climb in and out, and the windows that framed the mountain peaks shining above the forest. She flung the bags on top of the bed and went back down the hallway. She would not allow the memories to come again; she didn’t want them.