Hot in Hellcat Canyon (12 page)

“Gotcha.”

“But you’re pretty safe with any number of these options. If you keep to the Grubstake Trail, you can follow that on up to Whiskey Creek or Whiplash Ridge. You take the South Route, there’s a good trail about a mile from Rustler’s Ridge along Sassy Hooker Crossing, right on up to Full Moon Falls, and you’ll pass the Eternity Oak on the way there.”

“Those miners sure were colorful fellas.” Sassy Hooker Crossing, for some reason, made him think of lady peanuts. Just as colorful.

“They were at that.”

“I like falls.”

“Well, that’s your route, then. And you’ll like these falls. They are the
prettiest
thing ever. Now, if you’re a country boy, I don’t need to tell you what to do if you encounter a snake that rattles, or a bear or a mountain lion or coyote.”

“Don’t try to pet it.”

“Want me to tell you what else to touch and what not to touch?”

Rosemary had just lobbed him a good one.

“I wish you would have told me that years ago, Rosemary. Could have saved me some trouble and made me even
more
popular than I am.”

She grinned at him. “Leaves of three, let it be, sweetie. Don’t pick me any wildflowers if you don’t know the names of them. And don’t you slip up and carve the wrong initials in that tree.”

“Yeah, I don’t think you have anything to worry about there.”

P
ines, manzanita, Indian paintbrush, oaks, firs, redwoods and all manner of greenery kept the trails shaded for the most part, but the sun was ruthless where it made it through the tree cover, and it helped incinerate a little of J. T.’s restlessness.

He was halfway up the trail when his phone chimed in with a text.

He scrambled for it. He exhaled.

Still not his agent.

It was from Linda Goldstein.

John Tennessee, I have a stash of signed photos from Blood Brothers days. The ones with floppy hair. Do you still want to use them? If not, what would you like me to do with them?

Linda was the president of his fan club. He was bemused he still
had
an official fan club, let alone one with an elected officer; it was really more of a skeleton crew of women who never abandoned anything they started, bless them, whether it was a knitted afghan or organized adulation for star of a program that was popular before most of them were moms.

J. T. texted back:

Laminate them and use them as placemats for your cat’s dinner? Offer them to your boys for target practice?

A moment later a message trilled in:

HA HA HA! You’re the BEST. I know The Rush is going to be GREAT!

Accompanied by a flurry of emojis: various smiles and clapping hands and one inexplicable cat.

Linda had evolved from a gushy, giddy, alarmingly well-organized Tennessee McCord worshipper into a happily married, cheerfully harried, alarmingly well-organized mother of two teenage boys. And now she treated J. T. more or less like one of them: with a blend of affectionate “Go get ’em, Tiger!” and concerned clucking. She’d always been unequivocally on his side, which he obviously didn’t always deserve.

He texted back:

You can recycle them if you want. I’ll get you some new ones. We’ll have some great stills from The Rush.

Emojis in principle got on his nerves the way cherubs did.

But he hesitated.

And then added a smiling emoji before he sent it. Just a basic one. Because he knew she would enjoy it.

He wondered what Britt Langley’s policy on emojis was.

He smiled to himself, and then the smile evolved into a frown.

He was positive she hadn’t believed him, but he
hadn’t
asked a woman out in a long time. Not in so many words, anyway. For the past fifteen years, before Rebecca, it was more often than not his people calling some actress’s people and arranging a date. Or him saying yes to some hot woman who had flung herself into his path. Not that he was complaining, necessarily.

And he hadn’t gotten laid in . . . well, it wasn’t like he’d made marks on his wall like a prisoner in a cell. Months had gone by, though. Long enough for him to start feeling twitchy.

It was hardly for lack of opportunity.

It was just that the whole thing with Rebecca had left him feeling scorched and sobered. Together they’d been any publicist’s wet dream. They really should have worked. They were probably too dazzled by each other and their own publicity and mostly too busy to realize they excelled at making each other miserable, and it started to become really clear when her career took off and his foundered. He felt like he’d given the relationship his best shot. But there was no getting around the fact that they’d been hurtling toward the inevitable messy end for some time.

In inimitable Rebecca Corday fashion, she’d picked her moment to maximize drama and publicity. She’d needed to punish him, and boy had she.

Five years ought to be long enough for another person to make a mark on you, to reshape you a little, he thought. Apart from feeling disoriented for a while—every relationship was like a culture of two, with its own language and customs—mostly he felt like he’d been evicted from a small, hot, noisy party.

And maybe that said more about him than it did about her. Maybe he was indeed the problem.

He didn’t pass a single other soul on the trail, unless you counted deer and squirrels, the former of which galloped off, the latter of which scolded him from high branches. A blue jay followed him for a time, from tree branch to tree branch, squawking. A hummingbird strafed him, then moved on, satisfied it had shown him who was boss. He didn’t encounter any mammals of the kind with fangs or claws, but that didn’t mean they weren’t in there, watching him.

He hiked past sheer drops—thoughtfully labeled by the Forest Service—and staggeringly beautiful vistas of the canyon, carved out by a relentless river.

He heard Full Moon Falls before she saw them. The low roar was like a lover’s breath in your ear when things were just starting to get hot.

He forgave his mind for still being a little one-track. Nature was all about sex and death, anyway.

The roar was growing louder when he stopped at a respectful distance by a tree that could only be the Eternity Oak. The thing was immense.

A little bronze plaque at its base verified his supposition.

He moved closer to it and discovered the Forest Service hadn’t splurged on any engraving to describe the legend.

But someone
had
affixed a little note to the plaque. Folded like a note card, attached with tape.

He lifted it to read.

Think twice, man,
it said.

He laughed. His laugh echoed eerily.

The tree’s arms—branches, he corrected himself, but their graceful, twisting reach really did seem more like arms—spread way up and out, and the whole thing was as vast and intricate as an apartment complex or a little city, which it likely was for various forest fauna. Sun could hardly get through the branches, and when it did, it dappled the ground like a scattering of gold coins.

The place was arrestingly beautiful and as calm as a temple. And yet it made him a little nervous, as if there were something he needed to do in order to earn the right to even stand there. Like this was the Temple of True Love, or something, and he hadn’t paid the price of admission yet.

“Paid the price.” Now, there was a phrase calculated to chill a man’s blood.

He stepped closer to the tree.

On first inspection he saw only one set of initials.

ELB + GHG

But then he squinted, and an errant ray of late-afternoon sunlight picked out a few other sets of initials, scattered over it. He couldn’t read all of them clearly.

But one set was spotlit, set on a high branch, old and scarred now:

GEH + SLO

Who were they? He wondered what it felt like to be that
certain
. Or did their hands shake when they dug those initials into the tree?

He was pretty sure Felix Nicasio and Michelle Solomon would have no compunctions about carving their initials in that tree.

J. T. recalled an infamous article in the wake of his breakup: “Top Ten Reasons Rebecca Corday is better off without John Tennessee McCord.” The list read like some unholy brainchild of Rebecca’s publicist and her mother. Number Eight was, “He’s allergic to the ‘L’ word.”

Now, that was low. It wasn’t an
allergy
. He was more like . . . a self-proclaimed agnostic who refused to use the Lord’s name in vain, just in case he might be wrong. An awful lot of misery was perpetrated and endured in the name of love. Just look at what it had done to his mama, for instance. As far as he was concerned, the word deserved the type of fear and awe reserved for the Old Testament God.

He would have said it if he’d felt it.

Maybe he
couldn’t
feel it.

J. T. restlessly turned his back on those initials and the poor fools who’d carved them. He wanted to see the falls and get back before it got dark.

The roaring grew louder, and a few dozen yards later there they were: a lacy, foaming spill that cascaded over a terraced series of jagged stones and terminated in a pool, that turned into a stream, that likely ran off and joined the river. He looked up: the trees, as if in deference to the falls, stood way back from it, and he could imagine that a full moon would pour down through and light them up.

He did enjoy a good spotlight.

He stood and breathed in silence. He was beginning to recall one of the problems he always had with big swaths of unstructured time: a restless feeling set in, a niggling sensation that might be missing out on something. It could explain why he’d just kept moving in recent years.

So he turned around and headed back.

But he stopped at the Eternity Oak and listened.

One long, low branch reached down the road toward the falls.

Not that I would, but if I ever carve initials here
, he thought,
that’s where I’d put them.
Closest to the falls. So it’s like you’re hearing the breath of a lover in your ear while you’re sleeping.

“
B
ritt, honey, are you all right in there? I heard screaming.”

Britt popped her head out of her screen door and looked across at Mrs. Morrison, who, leaning over her porch rail, was limned in the last bit of the day’s sun. Her hair looked like a silver crown.

“Sorry to worry you, Mrs. Morrison. I’m just watching a movie. Someone just got murdered.”

“How exciting! Well, all right then. We won’t be needing this.” Mrs. Morrison lowered the Remington shotgun she was holding and leaned it next to her front door. She retrieved her Dr Pepper and rum on the rocks from the railing she’d placed it on and toasted Britt with it.

“Thank you for picking up my prescriptions,” she called.

“Oh, you’re welcome. It’s never a problem, Mrs. Morrison.”

“Well, good night, dear. Enjoy your film.”

“Sweet dreams, Mrs. Morrison.”

“They always are. Tonight I think I’ll dream of the day my Elwyn and I carved our names in the Eternity Oak.”

“Well, you tell Elwyn I said hi when you see him tonight.”

Mrs. Morrison chuckled. “I will, dear.”

Britt ducked back into the house and collapsed back onto her sofa, snatched up one of the pillows she’d re-covered with thrift store silk and clutched it to her, then held her breath as if going back under water and took the movie off pause.

She’d spent the last five minutes in a shabby, 1970s-era kitchen in Boston, immersed in the life of a cop, a simple guy who was kind of awkward, but good and solid and ferociously loyal. He’d been in love with the same woman his entire life . . . but she’d married his best friend. And just when he’d won a declaration of love from her—in bed no less—his best friend stabbed him.

And his friend hadn’t meant to stab him, they’d been fighting and it was all in the heat of the moment and quite an accident, and dear God in heaven it was quite a mess and very upsetting.

John Tennessee McCord was really, really good at dying.

He was also really,
really
convincing in the love scenes.

There were two of those.

They were real and raw and mostly naked and of the many powerful impulses that assailed her as she watched them, all were surprising, but two of them seemed strongest: she’d wanted to crawl in there and pull that woman off him. The word that had throbbed in her head throughout that scene was
MINE
.

The other impulse was to nibble on one of his smooth, hard brown shoulders.

But it was particularly fascinating to witness his transformation into that character: His posture, his diction, his mannerisms, his accent—he was seamlessly, one hundred percent a different person in his role in
Agapé
. It was a bravura performance.

Except his eyes. His eyes were the same. His eyes were so eloquent they were an entire movie unto themselves.

How did he know how to do that? Embody heartbreak and passion and fury and mute longing?

You either channeled that from some divine source, she figured. Or . . . you had to know how those things felt.

Good grief, that was hot.

God. She dabbed at her eyes as the credits rolled. Phillip laid a sympathetic paw on her knee.

She really had a problem.

Or maybe it was a solution.

A little Googling would help her decide which it was.

The problem was that she’d gone about the business of Gold Nugget Property Management all day, marking up big “For Sale” and “For Rent” signs with a big Sharpie, talking to tenants about trimming trees and fixing sprinklers and the like, and all the while she’d fully expected the John Tennessee McCord effect to fade from her body and mind, the way you eventually got your hearing back after a loud and fabulous rock concert.

But instead the rest of her day had been like that scene in
The Wizard of Oz
where Dorothy opens the door and suddenly everything changes from black-and-white into blazing color.