Strawberry Hill

by Catherine Anderson

  “I won’t leave without confronting him about Brody,” she messaged back. “I promise you that. But he’s talking with his employees now. I’ll wait for the right moment.”

  After pressing send, Vickie pictured her daughter tapping her cell phone keyboard at the speed of light. Then her phone pinged, and Nancy’s reply popped up. “The right moment was forty-one years ago when you sent him four letters to tell him about Brody. HE’S the one who blew it, the one who never replied. You owe him NOTHING. He deserves to be embarrassed.”

  Vickie thought for a moment before typing a reply. “I got a weird feeling while talking to him. Like maybe he doesn’t know about Brody. I don’t know how that could be. But what if those letters never reached him?”

  It seemed to Vickie that she’d no sooner sent her text than her phone pinged again. “FOUR letters, Mom? Give me a break.”

  “Maybe I made a mistake on the address,” Vickie wrote.

  “It’s a small town. He grew up there. Everyone knows him, and everyone knows where he lives. He got the letters unless you had a total brain fart and sent them to the wrong town.”

  Vickie knew she hadn’t messed up on the address. She’d known it by heart then and still did now. And she was absolutely certain that she had sent all four letters to the correct town. Mystic Creek was her home, the place where she’d been born, where she’d grown up. She’d never lived anywhere else except for Coos Bay. “No brain fart.”

  “Then he got the letters!”

  Vickie agreed with her daughter. She believed that Slade had received the letters and had chosen to ignore Brody’s existence. What other reasonable explanation was there? She was about to message Nancy back when she heard footsteps approaching. The dog pushed up on its front legs and whacked its plumed tail on the ground, sending pine needles and reddish dust airborne. She glanced up to see Slade walking toward her. She powered down her phone and pushed it into her pocket. Then she tried to collect herself. Seeing Slade again was difficult. Meeting his gaze was even harder. His gray eyes seemed to penetrate more deeply than that of other men. He made her feel naked and vulnerable.

  “Have you carved out some time to talk to me about that unfinished business?” she asked as he drew up about three feet away from her.

  “The only unfinished business you and I have is at the top of that mountain,” he retorted. “We’ve got a camp to set up.”

  Vickie ran his words through her mind twice, half-convinced she’d misunderstood him. “You mean you’ve changed your mind about letting me work for you?”

  He hooked his thumbs over his hand-tooled belt, which sported an elaborate championship buckle, a common accessory in Mystic Creek among men who were or once had been rodeo stars. “I need a cook, Vickie. And it’s a little late in the game for me to find someone else.”

  His change of heart had Vickie scrambling to regroup. If she was going up to base camp, she’d have plenty of time later to confront him about Brody. “All right.” That was all she could think to say. “I’m in.”

  “Then hop to. We’ve got horses to unload. Packs to balance. Last-minute inventory to take.” He pivoted on one heel and struck off toward his horse trailer. Over his shoulder, he said, “You know the drill.” Then he stopped, shot a smoldering look over his shoulder at the dog, whose butt now anchored Vickie’s left foot to the ground, and said, “What the hell, Pistol? Get your sorry ass over here!”

  The dog whined, gave Vickie a worshipful look, and then loped over to his master. Slade settled a big hand on the top of the animal’s black head, administered one pat, and then turned to keep walking.

  “Just one question!” Vickie called after him. “What made you change your mind about hiring me?”

  He halted midstride and swung around to look at her again. “I’m desperate.” He slid his gaze slowly downward, his look lingering on parts of her body during the descent. “You’re a little long in the tooth for the job. Men who pay top dollar for a guided hunt enjoy having a beautiful young woman prepare their food. But that’s the breaks. The only young and pretty applicant looked like a motorcycle mama. Tattoos. A nose ring. Safety pins in her eyebrows.” His firm mouth twisted into a half grin. “She looked damned good in black leather, though.”

  Vickie felt as if he’d slugged her in the solar plexus, but she popped back with, “I’m like fine wine. I get better and better with age.”

  “We’ll see how you hold up. It’s a lot of heavy work, and you’re no spring chicken anymore.”

  Vickie was more than willing to work. She just couldn’t believe he’d taken a jab at her about her age, or that he’d changed his mind so suddenly about hiring her. As she recalled, Slade had never been a waffler. Once he made a decision, he rarely second-guessed himself. Fortunately for her, his sudden change of heart would certainly facilitate her purposes better. She could earn good wages until midway through the last week of the season and then confront him about Brody. All hell would break loose then, but she wouldn’t care. She’d cull what she could out of her duffel, sling it over her shoulder, and walk back to the trailhead, grinning every step of the way because she’d be leaving him in a terrible bind without a cook.

  Chapter Seven

  Wyatt normally enjoyed shopping for base camp supplies. All perishables had to be purchased and stowed away in collapsible coolers to be transported up the mountain, where they would then be kept chilled with blocks of ice taken in that day by the pack train. But he was running too far behind this evening to take any pleasure in the process. He just wanted to get done, transport his horses to the trailhead, and take off. As it stood, he wouldn’t reach camp until well after dark, and then he’d have to unload the groceries. At least his tent was already up, and his bed awaited him. He wouldn’t be stumbling around in the dark trying to erect a shelter.

  At checkout, he had the misfortune of getting in line at Bernice Kaley’s register. Most of the younger guys in Mystic Creek laughed at her behind her back, because she flirted outrageously with them and seemed to hope she’d get lucky sooner or later. She was pushing seventy, but she still dyed her hair as black as a raven wing and wore it on top of her head in a weird, cone-shaped thing. Little sparkly things decorated it, and during the Christmas season, she wore flashers, which made her look as if she wore a discolored tree as her crowning glory. He wished he could stare at those hair doodads instead of her face, which was buried under so much makeup it cracked when she smiled. She seemed like a nice lady with a good heart, but that didn’t mean he could picture himself in bed with her, and she didn’t leave him with any doubt in his mind that that was what she wanted. He no longer engaged in physical intimacy, not even with women close to his own age. Nohow, no way.

  “Hello, Wyatt!” she said in greeting. “My, my, but you’re a handsome one!”

  Wyatt read her lips and wished he hadn’t. She wasn’t just coming on to him. He felt like a bowling pin in the path of a wrecking ball. How did a guy give an old lady the brush-off? He’d been raised to respect his elders, and there was no polite way to tell a female you weren’t interested. “Good to see you, Bernice. Only I thought you worked at Charlie’s Sporting Goods.”

  “Your memory is spot-on. I did work at Charlie’s.” Her smile blinked out and then came back on again. She shrugged and added, “Charlie had to let me go.”

  “Didn’t you work there a long time? Like, for years?”

  She nodded and batted her eyelashes, which were fake and reminded him of little black hearth brooms. His eyelids felt droopy just from looking at them. “Yes,” she lamented. “It was sad to leave.”

  He wondered if Charlie had been forced to fire her because she couldn’t leave the male patrons alone. She redefined the term cougar. Maybe she had an overabundance of female hormones. All he knew was that he couldn’t wait to get away from her, so he helped bag his purchases and put them in the cart.

  “So . . . what are
your plans for tonight?” she asked. “I’m going to watch college football. Are you a U of O fan?”

  Wyatt shook his head. “I’m not into football.”

  “Oh, well, we could always watch a movie . . . or find some other way to enjoy the evening.”

  “I won’t even be in town. I’m heading up Strawberry Hill to Slade Wilder’s base camp. Won’t be around much for the next month.” And, oh, how glad he was to have a legitimate reason to decline. He sensed that she was lonely—and he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. “Maybe you should go to one of the bars. A lot of them have televisions, and people go there to watch Monday night games.” With any luck, maybe she’d meet someone. “It’s a fun way to enjoy college sports, and most times everyone in the room is a U of O fan. Not always, though. Sometimes Beavers fans invade and try to start trouble. But that only makes it more interesting.”

  She offered him a smile, which was no longer syrupy with flirtatiousness. “Maybe I will. My husband’s been gone for over five years now, but the silence of the house still gets to me. It’s hard when you lose your other half. Not so bad during the day, but at night you feel lost.”

  Wyatt hadn’t known about her husband, but it explained her apparent loneliness. It also made him feel even worse for her. He thought of Tex, who was about her age, maybe a little older. He still had a fire in his oven. He might think Bernie was a hot commodity. If Wyatt could remember, he would mention to Tex that he might find some female company if he started shopping at Flagg’s Market regularly.

  Eager to put as much distance between himself and Bernie as possible, Wyatt paid the tab, grabbed the full cart, and almost ran for the door. Just as he got outside, his phone vibrated in his shirt pocket. He suspected that Slade had sent him a text to pick up something he’d forgotten to put on the shopping list. So he parked his cart against the front of the building, grabbed his cell, and swiped the screen.

  “Hi. This may sound a little crazy, but we got off to such a bad start that I got you a little gift as a peace offering. Still don’t have my work schedule ironed out, so I can’t deliver it to you. But I spoke to Blackie at the pawn shop, and he’s hiking the mountain tomorrow. He’s going to put the package—just a small one—in the supply box where the two trails intersect. If you can’t pick it up right away, no worries. Not perishable.”

  Wyatt frowned. Who in the hell was this? Deputy De Laney, possibly? She claimed to have scheduling problems at work. The number couldn’t be in his contacts, because the name of the sender didn’t show on his screen. Just then his phone vibrated again. He read the next message. “Oops! Sorry. This is Erin.”

  Wyatt smiled slightly. They’d gotten off to a bad start, all right. Because of the way she’d treated her uncle, he’d been determined not to like her. But something about her was starting to grow on him. That said, he would have very little spare time over the next few days, and going six miles back down the mountain to get a package might never happen.

  He texted back. “Glad it’s not perishable. It may be days before I ride back down the trail. But thanks for thinking of me.”

  His phone hummed again. “Fresh start?”

  His smile deepened. “You’re the one with a messed-up face. If you’re game, I am.”

  * * *

  • • •

  By the time Vickie was able to dismount at Slade’s base camp, it was almost dark, and she was exhausted and saddle sore. The men swung off their horses and immediately set to work, removing bundles from the backs of the pack animals, tethering equines to the high lines, hauling buckets of water up from the nearby creek to fill water troughs, and then sorting through the loads to carry one thing here and another thing there. Without any direction, she found the cookshack, which was a gigantic wall tent into which a wooden floor had been inserted. Although dusk hadn’t yet surrendered completely to darkness, the interior of the shelter was filled with shadows.

  Using a penlight she carried in her pocket, she took stock of what would soon be her kitchen. To one side sat a long plank table with individual folding camp stools arranged around it. Then she spotted a few oversize cans of chili sitting on makeshift shelving, but other than that, all the open storage space was bare. Against another wall, large plastic totes were stacked higher than her head. At the rear of the tent she saw a six-burner propane stove, a fiberglass sink with legs, a long, rectangular table which she assumed would be her workstation, and a lidded trash can with nothing in it, not even a liner.

  She resisted the urge to groan, find a seat, and hold her head in her hands. What if Slade expected her to cook tonight? And if he did, how in the world would she manage without a halfway organized kitchen? She whirled to leave the enclosure, only to run face-first into a rock-hard surface. With an umph of expelled breath, she planted her palms against the barrier and simultaneously felt a man’s hands curl over her shoulders. Slade’s hands. She recognized the breadth of them, the strength in them, and the warmth that radiated from them through her flannel overshirt, which had proven to be pathetically inadequate to ward off the chill of the mountain air.

  “You okay? I should have said something when I started to come in.”

  Vickie wanted to tell him she wasn’t okay, that his camp was a jumbled mess, and that he was dreaming if he thought she could cook a meal tonight. But mostly she just wanted to kick him for having said earlier that she was too long in the tooth to be eye candy for his male guests. “I’m fine,” she pushed out. “But I can’t say the same for this cookshack.”

  He sighed and cast his gaze over the interior behind her. “I’m sorry about this. My foreman, Wyatt, was supposed to get it all set up this afternoon, but he got held up by an urgent situation in town. He’s still riding up the mountain.”

  Setting her away from him, he removed his hands from her shoulders. “Don’t worry about cooking tonight or in the morning. We’ll heat that chili up over an open fire for dinner and breakfast, be happy with sandwiches tomorrow for lunch, and maybe we’ll have all of this shipshape by late afternoon so you can put a meal on the table tomorrow night.”

  Relieved that he didn’t expect her to cook right away on a stove that wasn’t even hooked up to propane yet, she relaxed her shoulders. “Mama used to stay at camp at least two days to get her kitchen organized. While she did that, Daddy scouted for wild game and then went back to be with her at night.”

  She saw his lips curve into a sad smile. “How are your folks? Are they still with us?”

  “Oh, yes. Getting up there, but aside from a few little things, they have no serious health issues yet. My dad turns eighty-four next month. My mom is only two years younger.”

  “Good people,” he said softly. “They sure know how to circle the wagons, though.”

  She cocked her head to see his face, wishing he’d take that darned hat off. Maybe he really had gotten thin on top, and he was embarrassed to be seen without it on. “What do you mean, circle the wagons?”

  “In the olden days on wagon trains, men circled the wagons to protect the women and children from Indian attacks. It’s just a saying now, and metaphorically speaking, your parents circled the wagons to protect you.” He stepped past her to grab three of the huge cans of chili. “When you left, they wouldn’t breathe a word to me of your whereabouts. I remembered that you had an uncle who lived in—was it Grants Pass?—and got his phone number from information, but he wouldn’t tell me anything, either.”

  Her heart gave a painful twist. “You tried to find me?” She hated the incredulous note that laced her voice. “I never knew.”

  He turned toward her, his arms locked around what would soon be dinner for everyone in camp. “Of course I tried to find you.” The hat brim concealed his upper face with shadow. “I know now that it was only puppy love, but at the time, I was still young and foolish enough to believe what we felt was the real deal. About six months later, I ran up a huge phone bill, calling
information in different towns to see if you had a phone number listed. My father was so pissed.”

  Vickie barely heard the last of what he said. Puppy love. Those two words cut into her like a well-honed butcher knife. She was older and wiser now, and she still loved him. What the hell would he call that, geriatric love? Only she didn’t have the courage to ask. Didn’t want him to know, or even suspect, that she still had feelings for him. “Yeah,” she said. “I thought it was the real deal, too. But it wasn’t. We both moved on, grew up, and”—she broke off, nibbled her bottom lip, and finished with—“lived our separate lives.” She hugged her waist, mainly because she felt as if her insides were shattering like fragile glass, but she shivered to make him think she was reacting to the chilly temperatures. “You did both of us a favor that night at your bachelor party.” She forced out a laugh. “You weren’t ready to settle down, and neither was I. Your infidelity with April Pierce was a wake-up call for both of us.”

  With that, Vickie left the tent.

  * * *

  • • •

  Slade swallowed back the denial that tried to spring to his lips. He wanted to yell, “I never slept with that girl!” But, hey, she’d already buried that hatchet, and it would be madness for him to try to defend himself again. She hadn’t believed him then, and she wouldn’t now. At the time, he’d believed that Vickie would come to her senses and realize he would never lie to her about something so serious. They’d been painfully honest with each other about everything else. He’d shared his deepest and darkest secrets with her, and she had shared hers with him. He’d confessed to her his wrongdoings of the past, and she had confessed hers. They’d laughed together and cried together. The night that his beloved old dog died, he’d wept in her arms like a child, and she’d held him as spasms of grief rocked his whole body. There had been no pretense between them. No holding back parts of themselves. She’d been his everything, and until she’d thrown her engagement ring at his feet, he’d believed he was her everything, too.