Buffalo Bill's Defunct (9781564747112) (2 page)

Her cell phone beeped. Meg touched the Talk button with a sweaty finger. “Can’t talk now, honey.”

“Mom!”

“I’ll call you back,” Meg shouted at the phone. Both fists gripped the wheel like death as the parade of vehicles emerged at the edge of another cliff.

Her daughter’s grumbles cut off. The dial tone hummed beneath the tinkle of Gershwin’s manic piano.

Half a jaw-clenching hour later, the landscape flattened. Signs of human habitation began to appear in the dense, rock-strewn forest—a shed here, a mobile home there, a dirt road trickling into the brush. The Lexus passed and inserted itself between Meg’s van and the log truck.

At the first turn-out, she pulled over onto loose gravel, shoved the gearshift into Park, and set the emergency brake. She popped the Eject button on the CD player and leaned back in the blessed silence, eyes closed.

Cars flashed past. She heard them but she didn’t look at the drivers’ reproachful faces. Finally she hit the speed dial and connected with Lucy.

“Are you still on the road?”

“You got it, kid.”

“I thought you were supposed to be in Klalo by now.”

“I’m doing my best. Highway 14 is a goat track.”

“You should have hired a professional mover. It couldn’t cost that much more.” Lucy was calling from Stanford University, one of the more expensive institutions of higher learning in the nation. She knew very well why her mother was economizing.

I will not quarrel with my only child. Meg fumbled in her nylon CD holder for soothing sound. The discs adhered to their tight transparent slots. Beethoven? Too dramatic. Vivaldi? Too jumpy.

“Mom, are you sure you’re making the right move?”

“It’s a crap shoot.”

“Mother? Are you all right?” Fear, confusion, honest concern. Lucy was a good daughter.

Meg sighed. “I’m fine, Luce, just not used to this kind of road.” She glanced at her watch. Three-thirty. She was only two hours behind her AAA TripTik schedule. “So how was the test?” She closed her eyes again and drifted as Lucy swung into an account of her first math exam. Math was important. Lucy wanted to be a physicist.

It was four-fifteen before Meg reached the city limits of Klalo, seat of Latouche County, and four-thirty before she pulled onto the driveway in front of her one-car garage. Driveway was a dignified term for two strips of grass-infested gravel. The garage, an afterthought of the 1920s, stood well back beside the two-story frame house she had bought in a burst of summer optimism. In the chilly light of mid-October, it didn’t look like home.

Maybe that was too harsh. What it looked like was a nineteenth-century farmhouse, though it faced a quiet tree-lined street near the library she was going to run. Head Librarian, Latouche County Regional Library. Sounded good.

The van fit neatly onto Meg’s period driveway, but the rear end of the Accord stuck out into the street.

“The hell with it,” she muttered. She set the brake and killed the engine. Because she was a short woman, she had to rappel down the side of the truck and reach up to slam the door. She fumbled the house keys from her purse, opened the side door that led into the kitchen, and sprinted for the bathroom. Bladder.

She washed her hands at the salmon pink retro basin and avoided looking in the mirror. There was no soap and no towel. She rubbed her hands dry on her jeans and picked up her purse from the cat-barf-patterned linoleum—original, the realtor had assured her with a straight face. When Lucy graduated from Stanford, Meg would replace the bathrooms, both of them. At least the one upstairs had a shower.

She drifted back into the kitchen. It was empty of appliances except for a propane range and a water heater. There was no dishwasher. The whole house was empty, in fact. That was as it should be, but the blank volumes of space made her uneasy. When the
ding-dong
of the doorbell echoed on the chilly air, she shivered. She moved the thermostat up to seventy-five as she plodded down the hall to the front door. The propane furnace whooped on. She drew back the bolt and wrestled the door open. It took both hands.

“Hi, I’m Darcy Wheeler. You must be Miz McLeen.” Darcy was plump, taller than Meg, and dressed in jeans. Her sweatshirt logo promoted Washington State University.

“McLean, like Shirley MacLaine, different spelling.” Meg forced a smile. “Call me Meg. Come in. Are you a neighbor?”

“Next door. The Craftsman with blue trim.” Darcy stepped over the threshold, two Styrofoam cups with plastic lids thrust before her. “I brought you a cup of coffee.”

“Uh, thanks.” Meg was wired from the drive.

“One’s decaf and one’s not,” Darcy said brightly. “Hey, no place to sit.”

“It’s pretty bare. I’ll take the decaf, thanks.”

Darcy, who looked fifteen but could be thirty, strode across the dusty oak floor of the living room and set her cup on the mantel. “Lots of room. Are you going to unload that humungous truck all by yourself?”

Meg followed her. “I thought I’d call a temp agency.”

“A what?”

Panic grabbed. “Where do I hire casual labor?”

“You mean guys to help you move the furniture? Gosh, we just get our friends to do that… Oh.”

“Oh,” Meg echoed. “Wow.” A little problem she hadn’t anticipated. The thought of heaving her refrigerator off the van all by herself made her want to hop on the first plane to LA—were it not that she’d have to drive the van to Portland Airport on Highway 14.

“Let me think.” Darcy sipped coffee and brooded.

Meg sipped, too. Not Starbuck’s but okay, a latte from the espresso stand on the corner, probably.

“I could go see if Rob’s home. His truck’s there.”

“Rob?”

“Your neighbor on the other side. He’ll think of something.”

The other side. Meg had coveted the Victorian gingerbread, though the house was too big for a single woman and not for sale.

“Yeah,” Darcy said. “I’ll talk to Rob.” She abandoned her coffee and disappeared out the side door. She knew her way around. Meg followed on leaden feet.

R
OB
Neill was painting the interior of the house after two years of procrastination. In the week of comp time he had taken, because otherwise he’d lose it, he had painted his daughter’s bedroom and the kitchen, and torn off a lot of wallpaper elsewhere. He had just reached the annoying alcove between the kitchen and the formal dining room. Like much of the house, the alcove had been done up in beige with cream trim. Rob’s grandmother had been an admirable woman, but he suspected her of color-blindness.

He had scrubbed the space with TSP, covered the oak floor with a tarp, and slathered everything with sealant. Now, at last, the moment of truth. Was the Mediterranean Blue his daughter selected in August going to be too dark? He squished the roller in its pan until the fleece cover dripped paint, rolled off the excess, and laid down a long, perfect stroke. Aha.

He set the roller on the pan and backed off a step, squinting. He could never remember whether latex dried lighter or darker. If darker, he was in trouble. The woodwork would be Circassian White, or whatever the paint company called it, and the old lace curtains had washed up well enough to lighten the gloom. Dark or not, the blue would do.

Grunting with satisfaction, he filled the roller again and set to work. As he lost himself in the rolling rhythm, his mind drifted. He was going to have to defend his budget. Again. He should be up at the computer crunching numbers. The sheriff liked numbers. How To Lie with Statistics. It was an election year. Mack always got nervous in election years, though he had been kept in office four times by the voters of Latouche County and had no serious rivals.

Rob laid down the last stroke on the north wall and set the roller back in the pan. Three-dimensional pie charts could be diddled. He soaked the edger in blue paint. Maybe a PowerPoint presentation with pie charts. Mack was susceptible to the Wonders of Computers, but Rob didn’t like PowerPoint graphics. I could just wing it, he mused, though he knew he wouldn’t.

The trouble with public service was that the public wanted it, even demanded it, and didn’t want to pay for it. A lot of new housing, all of it taxable, had gone in since the last budget battle. As far as Rob could tell, these new voters would spend half a million dollars on a house without blinking twice but a half-mil levy to support the library or the fire districts would go down in flames. “Ever git my hands on a dollar agin,” he sang in his unmelodious baritone, “I’m gonna squeeze it till the eagle grin.” The blue paint on the alcove wall looked pretty damned good.

He had finished with the edger and picked up the roller again when the doorbell rang.

M
EG
was standing behind the van, staring blankly and trying to remember how to unhook the Accord, when Darcy materialized on the far side of the car with the neighbor. She performed introductions and pronounced Meg’s surname correctly.

The man’s name was Rob Neill—a spondee,
boom-boom
. Robert, Meg supposed, or Robin Hood, or Robinson Crusoe. He was fortyish, thin, medium tall, with straight sandy hair turning gray, and he looked at her from unsmiling gray eyes.

“Hi. I’d shake hands but…” He held out a palm splotched with blue paint for her inspection. His clothes—jeans and a sweatshirt that told her Guinness was good for her—were pied with paint: blue, white, and lemon yellow.

“Sorry to interrupt you. Do you know how to unhook these things?” Meg gestured to the Accord on its little metal ramp.

He scowled. “Didn’t they give you instructions when you hired the truck?”

“They did, but my brain died about ten miles back.”

His mouth twitched. “Highway 14’s a slow drive. At least it wasn’t raining.”

The horror of driving that road in wet weather struck Meg dumb. She stared at him. It could have been worse.

He bent to look at the chain mechanism. “Hmm, yeah. Front-wheel drive car… Combination?”

There was a padlock. After a blank moment she came up with the code.

He removed the lock and fiddled with the hitch and the cables. “Okay.”

“That’s it?” Relieved, Meg fished in her purse for the car keys. She had three sets of keys so it took awhile. Docking her car neatly in front of the house, Meg returned to find Neill removing the towing contraption from the back of the truck.

He grunted and gave a heave. The mini-trailer dropped onto the gravel in a little puff of dust. He pulled it onto her patchy unmowed lawn, clear of the van. “I hear you need help unloading.”

Meg took a long breath. “I do. Two people, preferably. I budgeted two hundred dollars.”

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.